Xbox Series X|S outage exposed a flaw in offline disc access as Microsoft promises fix

Recently, the Xbox Series X|S ecosystem encountered a worldwide outage, and the most baffling part was that it even affected disc-based games, a type of physical media intended to work offline. The Xbox server outage prevented people worldwide from playing physical offline games. Xbox services recovered within a day, but this discovery has disturbed many gamers, given the unpredictable future of physical media.

Microsoft moved quickly to get ahead of the story, informing news outlets such as The Verge that physical discs should never have been affected in the first place. Xbox technology chief Scott Van Vliet explained what had actually happened behind the scenes. In his statement, he said:

“We’re looking into reports that some players were unable to access games using discs as expected during the service interruption. Disc-based entitlement checks should not prevent players from accessing their games, and this is by design.” He further explained the core problem behind the outage in a post on X, stating:

“Late last night, a licensing service that sits outside of Xbox, but which Xbox depends upon, began failing. This caused some sign-in scenarios to fail, and it caused many scenarios that require an entitlement check to also fail, such as listing out your Full Library and launching games that you own.”

The Xbox tech chief also confirmed that a fix was already underway to prevent further recurrences and affirmed that “offline mode is also designed to rely on those saved entitlements,” meaning that the local records on a console should allow a disc-based game to run without needing to connect to the internet.

For context, Xbox uses a technology system called Smart Delivery, allowing gamers to install the right version of their game depending on their hardware, and discs rely on a version of this tech called full-disc support. Full-disc support allows every executable a game requires to remain on the physical disc itself. So, inserting a disc into an Xbox shouldn’t require connecting to Xbox services or the internet. However, that system failed during the outage.

Van Vliet spoke candidly about how bad the whole scenario was and said, “Nonetheless, this is an unacceptable situation, and we must do better to support you.”