Maybe XBOX and PlayStation aren’t so different after all.
Both sides of the console wars have suffered lasting outages in their gaming services. On Monday, the Xbox outage was acknowledged by Sony’s CTO Scott Van Vliet, with the “major outage” status showing up in a number of services, such as preventing players from being able to sign in, view their library, or launch some games or apps.
The outage continued for a large part of the day, taking 13 hours before acknowledging the issue and the final tweet stating that the issues have all been resolved.
The outage was similar to Sony’s, but in Sony’s case it had an additional layer of irony thanks to the company’s recent rejection of physical media.
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What Happened to XBOX on Monday?
XBOX did eventually provide some insight from the chief technology officer addressing what had happened and what they would do in order to prevent this from happening again in a lengthy post on Twitter/X while also promising to keep the loyal players in the loop if such things were to happen again in the future.
Scott Van Vliet, XBOX CTO, wrote:
Earlier today, many players began experiencing issues with sign-in, enumerating their game libraries and playing games. The team has worked hard throughout the day to fix the issue, and we’ve restored service as of 2:30 PM PDT. Nonetheless, this is an unacceptable situation, and we must do better to support you.
Over the coming weeks, you’ll hear more from me about our services, our platform, and the work we’re doing to make XBOX better. And that starts with some transparence about this incident. Our on-call teams caught the first signals overnight through automated monitoring and declared a major incident.
Once we isolated the failing infrastructure, we shifted traffic onto the healthy parts of the system while the team continued to work towards a root cause. Service came back unevenly across regions which is why some of you recovered hours before others.
Even if the issue is now resolved, the Xbox CTO is still interested not in what could’ve triggered the long outage but in what can be done about it in order to prevent other ones from happening because so far, the all-digital future is looking bleak.
