Xbox server shutdown finally fixed as CTO provides official statement

Xbox users can finally get back online, following a wide server outage that left many games unplayable for owners on Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S.

On Monday, the Xbox network was down for roughly 15 hours, with many users unable to access their digital libraries and purchased games. Xbox Game Pass was also unavailable during this time.

Following Sony’s recent announcement to discontinue printing physical discs for PlayStation consoles, discussion about game preservation and ownership has become a lot more transparent lately, and this event has only made the all-digital future all the more grisly.

The issue appears to be fixed now, with many users able to get back online, though full connectivity may take a little longer to recover.

Following this, Xbox chief technology officer Scott Van Vliet has issued a statement on the outage, posting to X (formerly Twitter).

“Earlier today, many players began experiencing issues with sign-in, enumerating their game libraries and playing games,” Van Vliet wrote. “The team has worked hard throughout the day to fix the issue, and we've restored service as of 2:30 PM PDT. Nonetheless, this is an unacceptable situation, and we must do better to support you.”

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Xbox's server outage has raised concerns regarding ownership and preservation

Van Vliet explains that the issue lay with a “licensing service that sits outside of Xbox, but which Xbox depends on,” that began failing.

This caused sign-ins and digital licence checks to fail, resulting in many users being unable to access their Xbox accounts and game libraries. It also affected certain publishers’ games who also use those same systems, causing issues in games.

Van Vliet adds that “we're running a full post-incident review. I care less about the one-line root cause and more about the real questions: why a failure in one service was able to take down this much, why recovery took as long as it did, and what we can change so a single point of failure can't ruin your night again.”

He says 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.”

While PlayStation has announced plans to stop printing discs for games, Xbox has not made an official announcement regarding the future of physical media on its platform.

It is rumoured to be developing a “disc-to-digital” feature which digitises users’ owned discs into digital games in their library, with rumours also pointing to the fact that Xbox may also be interested in an all-digital future just as Sony is.

Xbox is currently facing backlash for recent cuts at Microsoft, which saw 3,200 employees laid off across a variety of different companies. Companies like Zenimax Online, id Software, and Bethesda Game Studios were hit hard by these redundancies. It is also the target of the BDS boycott, which aims to apply pressure on Microsoft to end its role in the Gaza war.