Xbox's 16-hour outage traced to third-party licensing service behind digital-rights checks

Xbox CTO Scott Van Vliet said a roughly 16-hour outage stemmed from a third-party licensing service Xbox depends on, not Xbox infrastructure itself. When that service failed, entitlement checks — Microsoft's digital-rights verification — broke, locking players out of libraries and games and hitting store and publishing partners. Van Vliet called it "an unacceptable situation" and pledged to eliminate single points of failure. A post-incident review is underway.