The company’s technical chief said a fix for the error would be coming soon.
Xbox experienced a strange outage earlier this week. Not only did the platform’s online services remain unavailable for almost an entire day, but even games on physical discs stopped working for some players. The company’s chief technology officer, Scott Van Vliet, explained that the outage was due to problems with an external licensing service. And if your knee-jerk reaction is that disks should still be readable even when web services are down, you’re right.
Today, Van Vliet said The edge that these license verification issues should not have extended to disks. “We are investigating reports that some players were unable to access games using discs as intended during the service outage. Disc-based rights checks should not prevent players from accessing their games and this is intentional,” he said. He then explained that disc access rights needed to be saved locally to allow games to work when a console is offline, but the system that allows this was not working properly. A fix will arrive for the issue in a future update.
This is yet another example of bad press for Xbox as the company has been struggling for months. Xbox followed a difficult 2025 with new leadership, price hikes and plans to cut 3,200 jobs.
