4 weeks ago
A prolonged Xbox outage that started on Sunday night did not just disrupt digital gaming; it also prevented users from playing games on physical discs.
According to the Xbox status page, the disruption began on Sunday at approximately 11:00 PM ET. The issues blocked players from signing in, opening applications, and searching for titles on the Xbox store. By Monday morning, the status page updated to warn that users "may have problems" running both digital and disc-based games, a problem that was corroborated by social media users.
During the outage, reporter Richard Lawler was able to open digital games he owned directly. However, trying to play games through Game Pass resulted in error code 0x87e107df, which points to a license verification failure. While the Xbox status page currently indicates that disc-based games should be functioning again, it notes that players may still experience difficulties with digital and backward-compatible titles.
Xbox addressed the situation via its support account on X. In a post at 2:03 PM ET, the company stated, "our teams are focused on multiple investigation angles and remain hard at work." Later, at 2:41 PM ET, another post shared that "Things are slowly improving" alongside an apology for "the long-running nature of this issue." Xbox did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Recently, reporter Tom Warren reported that Xbox has been testing a new feature designed to provide players with digital versions of games they own on physical discs. However, this outage underscores the potential drawbacks of systems that require online authentication even for physical media. The technical issues also come on the heels of major layoffs at Xbox, which were announced earlier this month.
Why It Matters
Modern video game consoles increasingly rely on digital rights management (DRM) and persistent internet connections to verify software ownership, a shift that has sparked ongoing debates about
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