- Xbox CTO Scott Van Vilet cleared the air surrounding the July outage, explaining "cascading failures" as the root cause.
- Van Vilet delved into how an external service required for Xbox Game Pass and other services malfunctioned, leading to the outage.
- The Xbox CTO assured players that the company is taking all steps necessary to avoid something similar in the future.
Xbox Chief Technology Officer Scott Van Vilet recently stepped forward to explain the root cause behind the 15-hour outage in July. He admitted that the disruption was an “unacceptable situation,” while also revealing the steps Xbox is taking to avoid something similar in the future.
Xbox CTO Explains Why July Outage Broke Players’ Game Libraries
According to a new X post shared by Scott Van Vilet, the outage was caused by an external service needed for Xbox Game Pass and Home Console sharing malfunctioning. This led to a series of “cascading failures,” which rendered parts of the Xbox ecosystem completely unresponsive.
While the initial issue was caused by an external service, the situation got worse because of a bug embedded within the Xbox client software stack. “This caused some sign-in scenarios to fail, and it caused many scenarios that require an entitlement check to also fail, such as listing out your Full Library and launching games that you own,” Van Vliet explained.
Since the primary authentication service for Xbox went dark, the client bug led to a wave of failed license verifications. This caused players to lose access to not only their online games, but also their Xbox discs, as the consoles could not verify whether players actually owned the games they were trying to run.
Van Vilet then revealed that, in the wake of the incident, Xbox engineers quickly worked to get around the issue, stating: “Our on-call teams caught the first signals overnight through automated monitoring and declared a major incident. Once we isolated the failing infrastructure, we shifted traffic onto the healthy parts of the system while the team continued to work towards a root cause.”
The post then delved into Xbox’s actions after the incident, while also investigating how something as massive as the July outage happened in the first place. Van Vilet revealed that Xbox will be “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.”
Were you impacted by the Xbox July outage? What do you think of Xbox’s plan to avoid a failure like it in the future? Tell us in the comments below!
