I'm sort of curious where this came from? Mojang has had multiplayer auth server for years before MS purchased Mojang. I view it as needed to make sure hacked version of minecraft can't connect to my servers.
Multiplayer Authentication service was down for about 4 hours last night (minimum, it might have been a lot longer since I finally gave up waiting and went to bed). Not a single word from Mojang/Microsoft about it either. Total amateur rubbish from a supposedly billion dollar outfit. All multiplayer servers were locked out for the entire evening. Really pissed me off, but I guess I get pissed off too easily these days, because I haven't seen a single other complaint. Perhaps other players just played SSP, I dunno... I play SMP only these days, and last night I couldn't play it due to some bullcrap about "Authentication".
And I don't understand your explanation really, but there's no need to explain it further because I really don't care to understand why Mojang has multiple authentication steps required. Just let me play the damn game I paid for.
Based on
this tweet from the night before, which everyone (except Mojang) was responding to LAST night... I see Mojang finally awoke at 3am my time to tell us "All services are currently up and running"... which means the outage/downtime was for approx. seven hours, and they never commented once about it during that entire time (to my knowledge).
That's why I call them a POS outfit, not because they didn't fix it (crap breaks, crap happens), but because they didn't even have the courtesy to tell us they were having issues. Good service heals all wounds, but a lack of service causes them. Mojang (and their boss Microsoft) do not understand that. I blame the Microsoft influence for that. I think the old Mojang was normal people, the new Mojang is corporate BS.