Microsoft has confirmed that this week's Xbox outage should not have blocked owners of physical disc-based games from playing offline, despite widespread reports that it did. Xbox technology chief Scott Van Vliet told The Verge that while disc games undergo "entitlement checks" against digital licences, this is designed to still allow offline access, and the company is investigating why some consoles were unable to correctly use saved entitlements during the disruption.

The outage began on Sunday night and lasted almost a day, stopping some players from accessing both physical and digital games, logging in, launching apps, or browsing the Xbox store, before being resolved on Monday evening. Microsoft has blamed an external licensing service and says a fix will be issued in a future update. The episode has fuelled anxiety over physical media preservation more broadly, coming as Sony plans to end PlayStation disc production by 2028 and as Xbox trials a disc-to-digital conversion feature, making it important that Microsoft demonstrate discs remain reliably playable.