Xbox back online after outage: CTO pledges "we'll do better" after hours-long disruption

Full text

Xbox chief technology officer Scott Van Vliet has commented on the outages that hit consoles yesterday, and has pledged to investigate the issues.

Following a PlayStation outage – which lined up quite nicely with the launch of the Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls beta, and was a lovely bit of synergy with Sony's pledge to go all-digital – Xbox players got to experience the same this week . The outage lasted several hours and prevented Xbox players from accessing their profiles. Crucially, it also stopped them from finding games in the Xbox store, accessing their digital games, and even some physical ones (presumably those which effectively work as a Game-Key Card), which is the cherry on top of the push for digital games.

Van Vliet has taken to Twitter following the resolution of the outage, saying, "this is an unacceptable situation, and we must do better to support you." He adds: "Over the coming weeks, you'll hear more from me about our services, our platform, and the work we're doing to make Xbox better. And that starts with some transparency about this incident."

Earlier today, many players began experiencing issues with sign in, enumerating their game libraries and playing games. 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… https://t.co/3y9TjxzKls July 28, 2026

He explains that the outage was due to the failure of a licensing service outside Xbox that the console relies on, which in turn caused the issues. Once the outage was noticed, the team "declared a major incident" and began work on sorting it.

"We're running a full post-incident review," Van Vliet says, adding that "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 change so a single point of failure can't ruin your night again." Crucially, he pledges: "We'll do better."

Still, the timing of these outages feel like they came at the right time. Players are still very unhappy about the prospect of an all-digital future following Sony's announcement, and there are fears that Project Helix will also not be supporting physical games. So hopefully, these events serve as a wake-up call to Sony and Microsoft .

Xbox is reportedly testing a feature to digitize physical game collections as PlayStation decides to phase out discs.