Xbox outage shouldn’t have affected games on disc, Microsoft confirms - The Verge

What the report says

The Verge reported that Microsoft says physical Xbox game discs should not have been blocked during a major Xbox service outage this week, even though discs are subject to licensing checks. Xbox technology chief Scott Van Vliet told The Verge that Microsoft is investigating reports from players who could not access disc-based games during the disruption, saying those checks are not supposed to stop people from playing disc games as intended.

According to The Verge, the outage began Sunday night and lasted for nearly a day, affecting sign-ins, app launches, Xbox Store browsing and access to some games. Microsoft’s Xbox status page indicated that both physical and digital games were affected for some users, and the company said the issues were resolved Monday evening. Van Vliet later attributed the outage to an external licensing service, while also saying Microsoft had identified a problem that kept some consoles from properly using saved entitlements during the disruption.

The issue matters because “entitlements” are the digital licenses that tell an Xbox console what content a user can access. Van Vliet said offline mode is designed to rely on saved entitlements, and Microsoft plans to release an update meant to prevent a repeat of the problem. The Verge also noted that Microsoft’s own documentation says Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S games with full disc support should be usable offline.

The report lands amid wider concern about the future of physical media and game ownership. The Verge pointed to Sony’s plan to stop producing physical PlayStation game discs by 2028 and Microsoft’s testing of a disc-to-digital feature, context that makes reliability of physical game access especially important to players.