Xbox chief technical officer Scott Van Vliet has explained the cause of Monday's major worldwide Xbox outage, which stopped players buying or downloading games, playing offline, and even using disc-based titles. In a lengthy post on X, he apologised and said the fault stemmed from a licensing service outside Xbox's own systems that the platform depends on, which broke sign-ins and entitlement checks used to verify which games a user owns, leaving many unable to access or launch their libraries.

Services were restored at 2.30pm PT (10.30pm BST) on Monday. Van Vliet said the failing service was isolated and traffic rerouted while engineers worked on the root cause, and confirmed a full post-incident review is under way, focused on hardening dependencies, improving fault detection, and communicating faster when issues arise. The outage came just days after a separate PlayStation Network failure, intensifying scrutiny of the games industry's shift towards all-digital services, while Xbox is separately facing backlash over 3,200 job cuts across its studios.