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Xbox issues statement on "unacceptable" major outage this week

Is this the future of increasingly digitised gaming?

Published: Wednesday, 29 July 2026 at 12:14 pm

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Chief technology officer of Xbox, Scott Van Vliet, has issued a statement after the company saw a mass system outage.

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The issues impacted game launches, access to game libraries, and sign-ins, with problems lasting over the weekend into Monday (27 July).

Despite being resolved by the Xbox team 13 hours after the issue was publicly recognised, Van Vliet took to X (formerly known as Twitter) to explain the situation in detail.

"Earlier today, many players began experiencing issues with sign in, enumerating their game libraries and playing games," Van Vliet began on Monday night.

"The team has worked hard throughout the day to fix the issue, and we’ve restored service as of 2:30 PM PDT."

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"Nonetheless, this is an unacceptable situation, and we must do better to support you," he continued.

The Xbox outage come after PlayStation also suffered one last week, which left thousands of players unable to access their digital games for hours.

As gaming moves further into a digital world, resolving major outages seems more crucial than ever.

In response, Van Vliet promised players further transparency to rebuild trust, saying: "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.

"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. Service came back unevenly across regions which is why some of you recovered hours before others."

After a thorough explanation of what led to the incident, Van Vliet reflected on Xbox’s next steps to avoid a system outage like this happening again: "We're running a full post-incident review. 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.

"That means 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."

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Despite promises for faster solutions, major outages across platforms have continued to raise concerns, especially in light of PlayStation’s announcement that the company are ending physical disc production in 2028.

Van Vilet ended his statement with a simple message for players: "We’ll do better."

Time will tell if such promises are fruitful.

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Authors

Belle LawGaming Content Creator

Belle Law is Radio Times's Gaming Content Creator, covering everything from retro classics and AAA titans to independent titles.

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