Xbox's Huge Outage Even Blocked Games on Disc
A widespread Xbox outage that began Sunday evening prevented players from accessing both digital and disc-based games, highlighting the downsides of online authentication requirements for physical media.
An extended Xbox outage that started around 11 PM ET on Sunday has caused issues for players trying to play not only digital games but also disc-based ones. Xbox's status page initially reported the outage, and later noted that users "may have problems" playing their digital and disc games, which was confirmed by social media posts.
One Verge reporter was able to launch digital games he owned, but games tied to Game Pass showed error code 0x87e107df, indicating a license verification failure. The status page later stated that disc games should now work, but digital and backward-compatible titles might still be affected.
In a post on X at 2:03 PM ET, Xbox support said teams were investigating the issue, and at 2:41 PM ET added that "Things are slowly improving," apologizing for the long-running nature of the problem. The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The outage follows recent major layoffs at Xbox announced earlier this month. This incident underscores the potential downside of a system that ties authentication requirements even to physical copies of games, as Xbox is reportedly testing a feature to grant digital copies of disc-owned games.
