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, on its support account on X, says in a 2:03PM ET post that “our teams are focused on multiple investigation angles and remain hard at work.” A 2:41PM ET post adds that “Things are slowly improving,” and the company is apologizing for “the long-running nature of this issue.” The company didn’t immediately reply 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.