I wanted to provide an update on the incident affecting some players trying to launch games and access other game library features last week.
— Scott Van Vliet (@scottvanvliet) August 10, 2026
What was the root cause?
As I previously wrote, an underlying service required for XBOX Home Console sharing and Game Pass purchased… https://t.co/hqC8ebV4oy
Xbox CTO says the issue that caused last month’s major outage has been fixed
The bug fix is rolling out in a mandatory firmware update
Xbox’s chief technology officer says the issue that led to a major Xbox outage last month has been fixed.
Xbox acknowledged early on July 27 that it was suffering “major outage” status in a number of its services, preventing players from being able to sign in, view their library or launch some games or apps.
The outages continued for a large part of the day, with 13 hours between Xbox’s tweet acknowledging the issue (it had been going on for some time before this) and its tweet stating that it had been resolved.
The following day, Xbox CTO Scott Van Vliet took to X to write a lengthy post explaining what led to the major outage, and vowing to investigate it to prevent it happening again.
Now, in a follow-up post, Van Vliet says the issue has been identified, explaining that “an underlying service required for Xbox Home Console sharing and Game Pass purchased content, as well as some PC scenarios, experienced an outage whereby an update to the system put some services in an unresponsive state”.
“This was compounded by a bug in the Xbox client software stack, which caused other license checks to also fail when that first service went down,” he added. “These two issues created some cascading failure scenarios that affected some players’ ability to launch games and causing cascading issues with library enumeration.”
According to Van Vliet, the issue has now been addressed, with a firmware update rolling out this week to Xbox users.
“We are transitioning ownership of the underlying licensing service to the Xbox team while our engineers are actively hardening the services and infrastructure for future updates,” he wrote.
“The client bug has been fixed in an upcoming release, which starts rolling out today, August 10, and becomes mandatory August 17.”
Van Vliet says Xbox’s engineering and operations teams will now focus on “looking broadly across our stack to improve reliability of our products and services”, to make further outages less likely in the future.
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