Xbox Fixes Major Outage That Prevented Users From Signing In, Launching Games

Xbox has acknowledged and fixed major outages on its platform that locked users out of their accounts and game libraries, unable to play any games they own for days. Xbox users began experiencing sign-in error on Monday as the company worked to identify a fix. After a day-long disruption, Xbox confirmed Tuesday that the outage originated from a licensing service failure that prevented users from signing into their accounts.

The outage has now been fixed, the Xbox Support handle confirmed on X Tuesday. Users should now be able to sign in, access their game libraries, launch titles, and make purchases on the store. The Xbox Status page, which reflected “major outage” as the company worked to mitigate the issue, now shows “all services up and running.” In addition to digital games, some Xbox users were unable to launch disc games and titles tied to Game Pass, as well, according to The Verge.

Xbox Outage Came From Licensing Service

Xbox’s chief technology officer Scott Van Vliet called the situation “unacceptable” and said the company must do better to support players. Vliet confirmed that the sign-in error began with a failure in a licensing service outside of Xbox.

“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,” Vliet said. “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.

“Our on-call teams caught the first signals overnight through automated monitoring and declared a major incident. Once we isolated the failing infrastructure, we shifted traffic onto the healthy parts of the system while the team continued to work towards a root cause. Service came back unevenly across regions which is why some of you recovered hours before others,” he added.

The Xbox CTO said that the company was reviewing the incident to investigate how a sole service failure led to a major platform outage, why the fix took long, and what can Xbox do to prevent a similar outage in the future.

“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,” Vliet said.