Xbox says game discs should have worked during its outage

Xbox experienced a strange outage earlier this week. Not only were the platform's online services unavailable for almost an entire day, but even games on physical discs stopped working for some players. The company's technology chief, Scott Van Vliet, explained that the outage was caused by problems at an external licensing service. And if your gut reaction is that discs should still be playable even when web services are down, you'd be right.

Today, Van Vliet told The Verge that those license check issues should not have extended to discs. "We're looking into reports that some players were unable to access games using discs as expected during the service interruption. Disc-based entitlement checks should not prevent players from accessing their games and this is by design," he said. He went on to explain that disc entitlements should be saved locally to allow games to work when a console is offline, but the system that enables that did not work correctly. A fix will be arriving for the issue in an upcoming update.

It's still an additional instance of bad press for Xbox when the company has been struggling for months. Xbox followed up a rough 2025 with new leadership, price hikes and plans to cut 3,200 jobs.