yesterday a lot xbox Users around the world were unable to log into their consoles, view their game libraries, or launch many games. This service issue has now been resolved, but Xbox CTO Scott Van Vliet isn't ignoring the issue. Instead, Vliet released a full statement on social media explaining how this issue occurred, how it was fixed, and what Xbox will do to prevent issues like this from happening again in the future.
Scott Van Vliet has a long career in technology. Starting as a web developer at Volcom in 1998, Scott Van Vliet has worked for numerous high-profile brands, including serving as VP and Chief Technology Officer and VP of Digital Play at Mattel, and GM of Amazon Alexa and GM and Director of Apps and Games at Amazon. Van Vliet joined Microsoft in January 2018, where he served as CVP of Engineering for Microsoft Teams and Azure. Van Vliet returned to Microsoft in 2023 after a three-year tenure at Relativity Space, where he served as CVP of Azure Open AI before assuming 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. The statement begins with a succinct summary of the issue and says that the Xbox technical team has been “working hard all day” to resolve the issue. Van Vliet's statement got even more candid, with the Xbox CTO saying it was an “unacceptable situation” and that Xbox “must do better” to support players. Van Vliet says fans can expect more transparency from Xbox in the coming weeks, starting with a full breakdown of the most recent Xbox outages.
Rearranges covers into correct US release order.
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Rearranges covers into correct US release order.
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The analysis begins with Van Vliet explaining the root causes of the disruption. According to the relatively new Xbox CTO, licensing services “outside of Xbox” began failing, causing logins to fail and subsequent entitlement checks to fail. Several publishing and store partners using the same system were also affected, causing users to have issues accessing some games but not others.
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Van Vliet then details the response from the Xbox technical team. Initially, an automated monitoring system declared a major incident. We then isolated the failing infrastructure and moved traffic to the “healthy part” of the system. The service then returned unevenly across regions, meaning some Xbox users were able to log in faster than others. Van Vliet didn't mention the issue in his statement, but it took about 12 hours for all Xbox users around the world to resolve this service outage.
The Xbox CTO's official statement concludes with what the company is currently doing in the aftermath of the outage. Van Vliet says Xbox's technical team is “undergoing a full post-incident review” and “cares more about real questions than a single line of root causes.” This is about why a failure in one service could affect such a range of systems, why it took so long to recover, and what changes can be made to prevent this problem from happening again. According to Vliet, the next steps for the Xbox technical team are to improve how the team detects and contains these types of issues and to respond “faster and more clearly” to fans when issues arise. Van Vliet thanks Xbox users for their patience and promises that Xbox will “do better.”
