XBOX Series X console and controller (Jake Brigstock/The Independent)Microsoft's technology boss has explained a bizarre outage at Xbox that prompted fears about the future of gaming. Earlier this week, Xbox players were hit by an outage that meant their consoles were unable to connect to the internet for around 20 hours. The Xbox outage only intensified that concern, since it suggested that even when players do own a physical disc they may not actually be able to use their games as expected. The problems came about because "a licensing service that sits outside of Xbox, but which Xbox depends upon, began failing", he said. The company would be running a full review to find out what happened during the outage, he said.