Back on Monday, Xbox went down for a good chunk of the day. The outage affected logins, access to digital content, and even playing physical games. The internet being what it is, starting pointing fingers at the people who were laid off. Others were saying that no matter if you had physical or digital, you still couldn’t play their games. It was a shit show. By 5:30 EDT, service was essentially restored. Now, the explanations begin.

Scott Van Vliet, Xbox’s chief technology officer, said it was an external licensing service. Xbox and several of its store and publishing partners rely on started having issues late Sunday night. “This caused some sign-in scenarios to fail, and it caused many scenarios that require an entitlement check to also fail, such as listing out your Full Library and launching games that you own,” Van Vliet wrote on Twitter.

“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,” he wrote.

Xbox Outage Explained… Sort Of

Van Vliet said Xbox was carrying out a review of what he described as an “unacceptable situation” after a single point of failure disrupted services for many consumers. He noted that the next steps involve “hardening the dependencies underneath sign in and game launch, improving how we detect and contain this class of failure and being faster and clearer with you when something breaks.”

“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,” Van Vliet noted.

If I may be so inclined to translate. “We don’t honestly know what happen. But we do know that is wasn’t our fault. So get off our asses.” To be honest, Microsoft is a bit more forthcoming than say Sony. However, will we ever hear about what actually happened. Not likely. But we will all be reminded of it when it happens again.