Xbox Outage Bug Has Been Fixed, Microsoft Says

Xbox’s Chief Technology Officer Scott Van Vliet has provided an update on the platform holder’s response to the outage of two weeks ago that left some players unable to access their libraries and play their games.

Van Vliet had previously explained that the outage was caused by the failure of an external licensing service used by Xbox and some publishers. In his latest message, Van Vliet clarified that this external failure was compounded by an internal one: a “bug in the Xbox client software stack, which caused other license checks to also fail when that first service went down.” He said that “these two issues created some cascading failure scenarios that affected some players’ ability to launch games.”

Xbox’s effort to make sure it doesn’t happen again is therefore twofold. First, fix the internal bug. This, Van Vliet said, has now been done in a patch that has already begun rolling out, and becomes mandatory for Xbox players starting Monday, Aug. 17.

The second part is to give Xbox control of the external licensing service. “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,” Van Vliet said. He didn’t name the service, although reading between the lines, it would appear to be a Microsoft system.

Van Vliet also promised Xbox players that the platform holder is working to improve reliability across the board, as well as roll out some “great new features” and “quality-of-life systems updates.”

Outages of this kind are uncommon but certainly not unheard of, although this one occurred at the worst possible time: just as Xbox was launching high-profile remake Halo: Campaign Evolved and attempting to move past the bad PR cycle caused by its drastic layoffs, and in the midst of debate about digital game ownership after Sony decided to end physical PlayStation game production.

The response of Van Vliet and his team has been swift and professional. But it doesn’t do much to assuage players’ concerns that, in the digital age, their right to access the games they have bought depends on fragile and complicated systems — and on the whims of the companies that run them.