THE FUSE

In late July, a large number of Xbox players discovered they could no longer play their games. A serious outage was preventing people from being able to log in, see their game libraries, and worse, even from launching previously downloaded games, reminding everyone that in our current age you own nothing and all your games can be taken away at any moment. Now, Xbox is reporting it’s found the cause of the issue, and it seems it was worse than just an outage—it also exposed a serious bug that caused “cascading issues with library enumeration,” which are some of my least favorite cascading issues. That bug has now, says Xbox CTO Scott Van Vliet, been fixed, and further measures are being introduced to try to prevent a repeat of the situation.