"This is an unacceptable situation." Xbox apologizes for the biggest service outage

Microsoft explained the cause of the massive Xbox service outage as a problem with the game license verification system, which also affected other services.

Microsoft commented on yesterday's massive Xbox service outage. Xbox CTO Scott Van Vliet apologized to players, explained the cause of the problem, and promised changes.

This is an unacceptable situation, and we need to do better to provide you with the support you deserve. In the coming weeks, I will share more about our services, platform, and the steps we are taking to make Xbox better. We are starting with full transparency regarding the incident.

The company confirmed that the cause of the outage was the game license verification system. The problem quickly affected other services, so engineers had to redirect the load to other elements of the cloud infrastructure and simultaneously restore the licensing system.

We will conduct a full post-incident analysis. I am less interested in a brief explanation of the cause than in answers to the questions: why did the failure of one service affect so many components, why did recovery take so long, and what needs to be changed so that a single point of failure no longer ruins your evening.

Microsoft also stated that they intend to find out why a problem with one service was able to paralyze a significant part of the Xbox ecosystem.