For nearly a full day, several Xbox users experienced issues logging into their accounts and actually playing their games due to error 0x87e107df. Eventually, as of 2:30 PM Pacific Time on July 27, service was restored, but the bigger news is that Xbox Chief Technical Officer Scott Van Vliet shared a lengthy, heartfelt letter to the community that went a long way toward assuaging fears that this may happen again.
Van Vliet began by calling this kind of outage "unacceptable" and vowed to do better, adding that Xbox users will start hearing more from him in the coming weeks. Then, he walked the community through exactly what happened, how it was fixed, and what they'll work on next:
- What happened. Late last night, a licensing service that sits outside of XBOX, but which XBOX depends upon, began failing. 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. It also affected several of our publishing and store partners who depend on those same systems which is why some of you saw issues in specific games and not others.
- What we did. 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.
- What's next. We're running a full post-incident review. I care less about the one-line root cause and more about the real questions: why a failure in one service was able to take down this much, why recovery took as long as it did, and what we change so a single point of failure can't ruin your night again. That means 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.
Van Vliet didn't just drop the letter and disappear, either. He actually replied to a few tweets, clarifying that this was caused by an internal service at Microsoft shared across multiple products, including Xbox, and acknowledged that there needs to be a solution for when this kind of dependency fails.
Even with this prompt reply, however, many gamers' minds quickly turned to the all-digital future that has been widely discussed ever since Sony announced it would end production of PlayStation discs in January 2028. The issue is clear: whenever such an outage happens, with no physical discs available, gamers would be cut off from playing. Admittedly, this is already the case for the many online-only titles, but it's still something to keep in mind.
Microsoft has not announced anything yet about Xbox discs, though rumors suggest it will follow Sony's lead.
About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
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