Many Xbox users were unable to play games on their consoles for much of the day Monday. After engineers fixed the problem, a division manager made it clear what was wrong.
Scott Van Vliet, Xbox’s chief technology officer, said an external licensing service that Xbox and several of its stores and publishing partners rely on began to fail late Sunday evening. “This caused some login scenarios to fail, as well as many scenarios requiring a rights check to fail, such as listing your entire library and launching games you own,” Van Vliet wrote on X.
Earlier today, many gamers started experiencing issues logging in, listing their game libraries, and playing games. The team worked hard throughout the day to resolve the issue and we restored service at 2:30 p.m. PDT. However, this is an unacceptable situation and…
— Scott Van Vliet (@scottvanvliet) July 28, 2026
Xbox on-call teams detected the problem overnight. “Once we isolated the failing infrastructure, we shifted traffic to the healthy parts of the system while the team continued to work on the root cause,” Van Vliet wrote. Engineers have gradually restored services in various regions. Everything was back online Monday at 5:30 p.m. ET.
Van Vliet (who became CTO in May) said Xbox was conducting a review of what he described as an “unacceptable situation” after a single point of failure disrupted services for many consumers. He noted that the next steps involve “strengthening the dependencies under game login and launch, improving how we detect and contain this failure class, and being quicker and clearer with you when something breaks.”
The outage prevented some players from playing digital and/or disc-based games. It also affected logins, launching apps, and searching for games on Xbox’s digital storefront. This impacted Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, and Xbox 360, as well as backwards compatibility features.
“Over the coming weeks, you’ll hear more about our services, our platform, and the work we’re doing to make Xbox better,” Van Vliet noted. As part of a restructuring of the division, Xbox laid off 1,600 workers this month and announced it would cut the same number of jobs by the end of next June.
