Xbox’s huge outage even blocked games on disc

An extended Xbox outage that began Sunday evening didn’t just cause issues for people trying to play digital games — it blocked people from playing their disc-based games, too.

Xbox’s status page initially reported the outage on Sunday at about 11PM ET, and it also prevented people from logging in, launching apps, or finding games on the Xbox store. This morning, the page also noted that users “may have problems” playing their digital and disc games, which posts on social media confirmed. During that time, my colleague Richard Lawler was able to launch digital games he owned, but trying to boot up games tied to Game Pass popped up error code 0x87e107df, indicating the license couldn’t be verified.

However, at 6:48PM ET, Xbox finally confirmed that the issues had been mitigated. “You should once again be able to launch games, sign in, and complete purchases,” the company said on X. “Thanks for sticking with us through a long one.” The status page also says that “All services up and running.”

Our own Tom Warren recently reported that Xbox is also testing a feature that will grant users a digital copy of games that they own on disc. Outages like this, however, are showing the potential downside of a system that ties authentication requirements even to physical copies of games.

The outage follows major layoffs at Xbox that were announced earlier this month.

Updates, July 27th: Xbox says the issues have been mitigated.