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Xbox Chief Technology Officer Scott Van Vliet took to social media last night to apologise for the widespread outage that left some players unable to sign in, view game libraries, or, in the worst cases, launch either digital titles or physical disc-based games on Xbox.
The server crash began in the early hours of July 28 and lasted for roughly 20 hours. Whilst some speculated it was linked to Xbox's rumoured Disc-to-Digital feature, which will allow players to create digital versions of their physical game libraries, that wasn't the cause. Van Vliet, who was appointed Xbox CTO back in May 2026, was quite open about the incident, posting to his Twitter/X account what happened, what the team did, and what comes next.
Here's what Xbox's CTO said caused the outage:
"Late last night, a licensing service that sits outside of XBOX, but which XBOX depends upon, began failing. 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."
The Xbox exec goes on to explain that once they "isolated the failing infrastructure" the Xbox Support team got to work fixing the issues, which led to the service coming back "unevenly across regions which is why some of you recovered hours before others."
When we asked you, we did notice a lot of you were completely unaffected by yesterday's outage, whilst others didn't get back online and playing until sometime in the early hours. I managed to get my games back up and running at midnight! Van Vliet continues by outlining what Xbox are planning to make sure an outage of this magnitude doesn't happen again:
"We're running a full post-incident review. I care less about the one-line root cause and more about the real questions: why a failure in one service was able to take down this much, why recovery took as long as it did, and what we change so a single point of failure can't ruin your night again. That means hardening the dependencies underneath sign in and game launch, improving how we detect and contain this class of failure, and being faster and clearer with you when something breaks."
Admittedly, yesterday sucked. I was looking forward to hanging out with some friends online, but what concerned me most wasn't missing a gaming sesh, it was the bigger question of how we preserve our games for offline play, and why so much of our gaming libraries can become inaccessible when the Xbox servers go down.