Xbox suffered a significant outage this week that took its online services down for nearly a full day, and unusually, also blocked some players from launching games via physical discs. The company's technology chief, Scott Van Vliet, confirmed the disc issue should never have happened, since disc-based games are designed to work offline through locally stored licence entitlements. The episode adds to a run of bad publicity for Microsoft's gaming division amid a difficult period for the brand.

Van Vliet told The Verge the outage stemmed from problems at an external licensing service, and that disc entitlement checks are meant to be saved locally precisely so games remain playable when a console is offline or online services fail. That safeguard did not function correctly during this incident, though Xbox says a fix is being prepared for an upcoming update. The disruption follows a troubled 2025 for Xbox, which has since seen a leadership shake-up, price increases, and plans to cut around 3,200 jobs.