Xbox Boss Explains Recent Network Issues Amid Continued Silence Over PSN Outage

Xbox CTO Scott Van Vliet has issued a detailed explanation revealing how and why Xbox users ran into a litany of network issues on Monday. The move is being praised and directly compared to PlayStation as it continues to maintain radio silence following its own outage late last week.

Xbox CTO Scott Van Vliet has issued a detailed explanation revealing how and why Xbox users ran into a litany of network issues on Monday. The move is being praised and directly compared to PlayStation as it continues to maintain radio silence following its own outage late last week.

Xbox CTO Addresses Network Outage And Details Next Steps

Xbox controller illuminated in green on a desk beside a keyboard.

Van Vliet issued a lengthy statement on Twitter on Monday night, confirming that the issues had been resolved, but labeled it an “unacceptable situation”. The post is then broken down into sections explaining what happened, how it was fixed, and how Xbox plans to avoid running into the same problems in the future.

“A licensing service that sits outside of Xbox, but which Xbox depends upon, began failing,” the CTO explained. “This caused some sign-in scenarios to fail, and it caused many scenarios that require an entitlement check to also fail, such as listing out your Full Library and launching games that you own.”

Van Vliet goes on to explain that users were shifted to healthy parts of the system while the affected areas were being fixed, which is why some made it through the storm faster than others. As for how Xbox plans to prevent this from happening again, the CTO’s main focus now is to identify how “a failure in one service was able to take down this much,” along with why it took so long to fix.

The Xbox boss is being praised for not only addressing the issue, but explaining what happened in such detail, and for pointing out how it might be avoided in the future. It’s even more unfortunate timing for PlayStation as, after PSN suffered similar issues last week, the studio hasn’t even acknowledged it happened, much less explained how it plans to do better.

PlayStation’s ignore everyone at all costs approach typically lands it in a better position than Xbox, where the leads are often scrambling over one another to deliver mixed messages. This is a rare scenario where the opposite is true. Two network outages across both platforms in such close proximity. Van Vliet almost certainly saw the gaming world continue to pile on PlayStation for burying its head in the sand and seized the opportunity to score Xbox some much-needed brownie points.

More important than that is the need to ease fears that this isn’t going to be a common occurrence. As Van Vliet notes, games that Xbox users own became unplayable during its network outage. Xbox has avoided confirming it plans on following in PlayStation’s all-digital footsteps, but it seems almost inevitable that will be the case. It’s one of the most unpopular decisions PlayStation has ever made, and the outages across both companies during the past week demonstrate why.