Xbox’s huge outage even blocked games on disc

An extended Xbox outage that began Sunday evening hasn’t just caused 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 has 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.

The status page still says that users might run into issues with digital and backward-compatible games, but it also indicates that disc-based games should now work. Xbox, in a 5:26PM ET post on X, says that it’s “making progress on recovery” and that most players “should be able to launch titles and complete purchases again.” The company hasn’t replied to a request for comment.

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.

Update, July 27th: Added new Xbox post about “making progress.”