Xbox says it has fixed the underlying problems behind its major July outage, which prevented users from accessing digital content and, in some cases, playing games on physical discs. The incident matters because it exposed how dependent modern consoles are on online licensing systems, even for games bought on disc.

The outage began with a failure at an external service used for Game Pass purchases, home-console sharing and certain PC functions, while a separate Xbox bug also disrupted licence checks. Chief technical officer Scott Van Vliet said the fix has already been released, will become mandatory on 17 August, and that Xbox has assumed ownership of the affected licensing service while strengthening its infrastructure.