Devices · 20h ago
Xbox 16-hour outage blocked disc games due to licensing glitch
A 16-hour Xbox outage on July 26 prevented users from playing even physical disc games across three console generations. Xbox CTO Scott Van Vliet attributed the issue to a third-party licensing service failure that took hours to resolve. The incident highlights the fragility of digital licensing dependencies in modern gaming systems.
Meridian48 take
The outage underscores how even physical media now relies on online checks, raising questions about long-term game preservation and ownership.
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16-hour Xbox outage even stopped physical games from working — company blames licensing issue for incident that prohibited gaming across three generations of console →
Tom's Hardware
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