Xbox players were having trouble launching their games or accessing their library yesterday. Microsoft's gaming division's servers were down for most of the day due to a massive outage that affected games, accounts, the store, and even mobile services. By 2:30 PM Pacific Time on Monday, the restoration was fully complete, and Microsoft has now explained the specific reasons for the outage.
Xbox players were having trouble launching their games or accessing their library yesterday. Microsoft's gaming division's servers were down for most of the day due to a massive outage that affected games, accounts, the store, and even mobile services. By 2:30 PM Pacific Time on Monday, the restoration was fully complete, and Microsoft has now explained the specific reasons for the outage.
Xbox CTO Scott Van Vleet posted a lengthy report on social media apologizing for the issues and sharing details. He revealed that the “domino effect” on Xbox caused a crash in Microsoft’s hardened third-party licensing service, which is used across the company’s various products, Neowin reports .
“Late last night, there was an outage in the licensing service, which is hosted outside of Xbox but on which Xbox relies. This resulted in issues logging in to accounts, as well as crashes in many scenarios that require authorization,” Van Vleet said. “This also impacted several of our publishers and store partners who rely on the same systems. This is why some of you may have seen issues with specific games, rather than all of them.”
Once the Xbox night monitoring team realized what was happening, they isolated the problematic infrastructure and tried to find the root cause of the outage. Services were brought back to life region by region as the team rerouted traffic to healthy parts of the system, and by 2:30 PM PT, the initial issue was fully resolved.
Van Vliet noted that instead of analyzing the bug itself that brought down the systems, the main focus of the current investigation is to find out why a single service failure caused damage of such magnitude and why recovery took so long.
“This means we need to strengthen the security of dependencies that log in and launch games, improve the detection and localization of these types of failures, and inform you more quickly and clearly when something breaks,” the CTO added. “Thank you for your patience and reporting bugs, which really helped us find the problem. We will fix it.”
