“This is an unacceptable situation”—Xbox CTO Addresses Major Outage

Unless you were under a rock on Monday, you know that Xbox suffered a major outage that lasted roughly 15-16 hours. The outage prevented users from signing in, downloading games, and even playing some downloaded games that required check-ins.

Xbox quickly acknowledged the issue and said it was working to find a solution, but it still took hours to get the service back up and running.

It wasn’t until roughly 5:30pm ET that service was fully restored. And now, just hours later, Xbox CTO Scott Van Vliet posted a lengthy message on Twitter to speak on what happened.

Xbox “Must Do Better”

Van Vliet started his statement acknowledging what happened and calling it an “unacceptable situation”, adding that the Xbox “must do better to support you.”

He says that in the upcoming weeks, he’ll be providing an update on Xbox’s services and what he is planning in order to make it a more stable and reliable platform. In the meantime, he shed some light on what happened that resulted in the service being disrupted.

“Late last night, a licensing service that sits outside of Xbox, but which Xbox depends upon, began failing,” Val Vliet said. “This caused some sign-in scenarios to fail, and it caused many scenarios that require an entitlement check to also fail, such as listing out your Full Library and launching games that you own. It also affected several of our publishing and store partners who depend on those same systems, which is why some of you saw issues in specific games and not others.”

He said that on-call teams caught the signals overnight and declared a “major incident”. After that, they worked to single out the failing infrastructure and move traffic onto different, healthy parts of their system.

“Service came back unevenly across regions, which is why some of you recovered hours before others,” he explained.

With the service up, Van Vliet says the company is already working on a post-incident review. He says there are multiple questions they need answers to, such as why a single failure in one area brought down the service as much as it did, why recovery took so long, and what can be changed to prevent it from happening again.

What do you think of the entire Xbox outage situation and the messaging from the company after? Leave your thoughts in the comments below, or join the discussion in the official Insider Gaming Discord.

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