Xbox Chief Technology Officer Scott Van Vilet recently stepped forward to explain the root cause behind the 15-hour outage in July. Xbox CTO Explains Why July Outage Broke Players’ Game LibrariesAccording to a new X post shared by Scott Van Vilet, the outage was caused by an external service needed for Xbox Game Pass and Home Console sharing malfunctioning. This led to a series of “cascading failures,” which rendered parts of the Xbox ecosystem completely unresponsive. Image Credit: Xbox (Made by Beebom)While the initial issue was caused by an external service, the situation got worse because of a bug embedded within the Xbox client software stack. Since the primary authentication service for Xbox went dark, the client bug led to a wave of failed license verifications.