Bleak Future: A few hours after recovering from the "great Xbox outage" of July 2026, Microsoft is now trying to assure customers that these kinds of systemic issues will not happen again in the future. Earlier this week, the Xbox network became unavailable to a majority of players. Users were unable to launch their purchased games, sign in, or complete new purchases, with even offline games and disc-based releases being affected by the outage. While the investigation is ongoing, Xbox CTO Scott Van Vliet has shared a few crucial details about the outage. Microsoft uses this service to manage licenses and user access to several products, but the Xbox network was hit hard when the service began to fail.