Xbox has explained the cause of a major outage that left many users unable to sign in, view their game libraries or launch titles for much of Monday. Chief technology officer Scott Van Vliet said the problem stemmed from an external licensing service used by Xbox and several of its store and publishing partners, which began malfunctioning late on Sunday night, triggering widespread failures in sign-in and entitlement checks. The disruption matters because it affected a broad swathe of Xbox's ecosystem and came just weeks after the company cut jobs as part of a wider restructuring, raising questions about the resilience of its infrastructure.

Engineers detected the fault overnight and worked to reroute traffic to unaffected systems while investigating the root cause, with services fully restored by 5.30pm ET on Monday. The outage hit Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One and Xbox 360 consoles, disrupting both digital and disc-based games as well as backward compatibility features. Van Vliet, who became CTO in May, called the incident "unacceptable" and said Xbox would review its systems, aiming to strengthen the infrastructure behind sign-in and game launches and improve detection of similar failures. The outage followed this month's announcement of 1,600 job cuts at Xbox, with a further 1,600 planned by the end of next June.