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Xbox Chief Technology Officer Scott Van Vliet, who was praised for his transparency following the major Xbox outage that left some users unable to play games - discs or digital - is back with another update.
On July 28th, Van Vliet stated that a "licensing service that sits outside of XBOX" caused the server crash that lasted roughly 20 hours. He went on to say Xbox engineers were "running a full post-incident review" and hoped to understand "why a failure in one service was able to take down this much".
The Xbox CTO has taken to social media once more to share his findings, including the root cause, what Microsoft has done to address it, and what comes next.
"As I previously wrote, an underlying service required for XBOX Home Console sharing and Game Pass purchased content, as well as some PC scenarios, experienced an outage whereby an update to the system put some services in an unresponsive state. This was compounded by a bug in the XBOX client software stack, which caused other license checks to also fail when that first service went down. These two issues created some cascading failure scenarios that affected some players' ability to launch games and causing cascading issues with library enumeration."
Van Vliet went on to explain what actions have been taken, including a shift in ownership from external services to the Xbox team, ahead of a client bug fix that began rolling out today.
"We are transitioning ownership of the underlying licensing service to the XBOX team while our engineers are actively hardening the services and infrastructure for future updates. The client bug has been fixed in an upcoming release, which starts rolling out today, August 10, and becomes mandatory August 17."
Hopefully this means another outage of this magnitude is unlikely to happen again. It has to be said too, that Xbox's new CTO is a breath of fresh air, showing the same level of openness and transparency as CEO Asha Sharma, who appointed Scott Van Vliet earlier this year.
Van Vliet wraps up his post by saying "our engineering and operations teams are looking broadly across our stack to improve reliability of our products and services", before teasing "some great new features" and quality-of-life improvements coming to Xbox consoles in the weeks and months ahead.