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Xbox has finally spoken about the major service outage that affected thousands of players around the world. After services returned, Xbox Chief Technology Officer Scott Van Vliet shared a public apology, saying that the company understands how disappointing the outage was and promised that the team would learn from it.
Initially, the reason wasn’t clear, and the CTO never mentioned the root cause of the issue, but the apology message that the Xbox CTO shared on X (formerly Twitter) stated, “A licensing service that sits outside of Xbox, but which Xbox depends upon. Some sign-in scenarios to fail, and it caused many scenarios that require an entitlement check to also fail.”
However, Scott Van Vilet explained the problem also impacted several publishing and store partners who relied on the same backend licensing systems during the Xbox outage. About this inconvenience, he has mentioned Xbox ‘must do better.’
Microsoft has not shared every technical detail, but it says improving stability is now a top priority.
The problem, titled error code 0x87e107df, has bothered players for almost 20 hours on Monday. It has stopped players from opening digital games, using Game Pass, making purchases, and accessing other online features.
The outage was linked to Xbox's online systems, which verify the identity of the account that players use to launch a game. When those systems stopped working, many players could not launch games they already owned. Game Pass users were also affected because several titles could not complete the required online check.
Also Read: Xbox Game Pass Subscribers Have Until July 31 to Play These 7 Games
Service outages can happen on any gaming platform, including PlayStation and Steam. The difference is often how quickly companies respond and how clearly they keep players informed. Regular updates during an outage help users know what is happening instead of leaving them guessing.
Xbox can improve by sharing faster updates and strengthening its systems. Giving players better access to their digital games during server problems would also build more trust. Small improvements like these can make a big difference when the next unexpected outage happens.
