On August 10, Scott Van Vliet, the Chief Technology Officer at Xbox, shed light on the recent widespread outage that plagued Xbox Live. This outage, marking the most severe disruption in recent memory for Xbox users, persisted for over a day. It left gamers in numerous countries unable to access a range of services, and even rendered authorization checks for physical game discs ineffective. The root cause of the outage lay in an update to the underlying licensing service, which subsequently rendered the related dependencies unresponsive. This issue, compounded by bugs in the client software stack, resulted in failed license checks for digital games. In a bid to bolster service stability, Microsoft has decided to transfer control of the underlying licensing service to the Xbox team. Concurrently, a fix for the client-side bugs has already been rolled out, with a mandatory download scheduled for August 17, 2026.