"Our engineers are actively hardening the services and infrastructure."

Image credit: Microsoft

Xbox says it has fixed the issue at the heart of the major service outage suffered in July. Chief technical officer Scott Van Vliet, who initially offered an explanation as to why so many services were affected, promised to investigate further at the time, and he has now returned with an update.

If you read Van Vliet's original explanation, you'll know the outage was caused by an outside service that Xbox relies on. The service controls Game Pass purchased content, home console sharing and other "PC scenarios". Unfortunately, Xbox's systems themselves had a separate bug that appeared at the same time, taking down license checks with them - which is why not even discs worked when the servers went down.

Van Vliet confirmed on X that the bug has been fixed and a client update has already rolled out, and will become mandatory from 17th August. The Xbox team has now taken over ownership of the licensing service in question while work continues on "hardening the services and infrastructure".

Image credit: Microsoft

That's not all: the incident has pushed engineering and operations teams to "look broadly across our stack to improve reliability of our products and services". "We will have more updates to share in the weeks and months ahead as we roll out some great new features for players, paired with quality of life systems updates," Van Vliet added.

Xbox's outage in July came just days after PlayStation suffered its own breakdown. The coincidental timing highlighted how reliant games are today on server infrastructure, even when physical discs are involved. As discs go away and digital becomes the sole way of acquiring and playing games, similar outages threaten to render entire console ecosystems unusable.

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