Xbox experienced a major outage on Monday, preventing many users from signing in, accessing their game libraries, and launching games. Scott Van Vliet, Xbox's chief technology officer, explained that the issue stemmed from a critical external licensing service that Xbox and its partners depend on. This service began malfunctioning late Sunday night, leading to failures in sign-in and entitlement checks.

Xbox's on-call teams detected the problem and rerouted traffic to healthy systems while engineers worked on a solution. Services were gradually restored, with full functionality back online by 5:30 PM ET on Monday. Van Vliet described the situation as "unacceptable" and announced a review to prevent future disruptions.

The outage affected Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, and Xbox 360 consoles, impacting both digital and disc-based games, as well as app launches and storefront access. Van Vliet promised further updates on improvements to Xbox services and platform reliability in the coming weeks, following the company's recent layoffs.