Yesterday, many Xbox users around the world were unable to sign in to their consoles, view their game libraries, or launch many of their games. This service issue has now been fixed, but Xbox CTO Scott Van Vliet isn’t brushing it under the rug. Instead, Vliet has issued a full statement on social media explaining how this issue occurred, how it was fixed, and what Xbox will do in the future to prevent an issue like this happening again.
Scott Van Vliet has a long and storied career in the tech space. Beginning as a web developer for Volcom in 1998, Scott Van Vliet has worked with a plethora of well-known brands, including Mattel, where he worked as the VP & Chief Technology Officer and VP of Digital Play, and Amazon, where he worked as the GM of Amazon Alexa and the GM & Director of Apps and Games. Van Vliet joined Microsoft in January 2018, where he worked as the CVP of Engineering for Microsoft Teams & Azure. After a 3-year tenure at Relativity Space, Van Vliet returned to Microsoft in 2023, working as the CVP of Azure Open AI before taking on the role of Xbox Chief Technology Officer in May 2026.
Shortly after the official Xbox Support Twitter account shared that the recent service outage had been resolved, Xbox CTO Scott Van Vliet shared his own statement on social media. This statement begins with a succinct summary of the issue and says that the Xbox tech team “worked hard throughout the day” to fix the issue. Van Vliet’s statement then turns more candid, with the Xbox CTO saying that this is “an unacceptable situation,” and that Xbox “must do better” to support players. Van Vliet says that fans can expect more transparency from Xbox in the coming weeks, and that starts with a full breakdown of this most recent Xbox service outage.
Rearrange the covers into the correct US release order.
Rearrange the covers into the correct US release order.
Easy (5)Medium (7)Hard (10)
This breakdown begins with Van Vliet explaining the root cause of this outage. According to the relatively new Xbox CTO, a licensing service that “sits outside of Xbox” began failing, which caused sign-ins to fail, and caused subsequent entitlement checks to also fail. Several publishing and store partners who use the same system were also affected, which is why users had issues accessing some games and not others.
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Van Vliet then details the response from Xbox’s technical teams. At first, an automated monitoring system declared a major incident. The failing infrastructure was then isolated, and traffic was shifted to the “healthy parts” of the system. Service then returned unevenly across regions, which is why some Xbox users were able to sign in sooner than others. While Van Vliet doesn’t mention it in his statement, it took around 12 hours for this service outage to be resolved for all Xbox users around the globe.
The Xbox CTO’s official statement concludes with what the company is doing now in the aftermath of the service outage. Van Vliet states that Xbox’s tech team is “running a full post-incident review,” and that he cares less about the “one-line root cause and more about the real questions,” those being why a failure in one service was able to affect such a range of systems, why recovery took as long as it did, and what can be changed to ensure this issue doesn’t happen again. The next steps for the Xbox tech team, according to Vliet, are to improve how the team detects and contains this type of issue, and to be “faster and clearer” with fans when an issue does occur. Van Vliet thanks Xbox users for their patience, and promises that Xbox will “do better.”
