On July 27, 2026, Xbox suffered possibly the worst outage to its live services in recent memory. The outage lasted almost an entire day and prevented people from logging into their profiles and launching downloaded games and apps.
After the debacle was over, Xbox CTO Scott Van Vilet logged on to Apologize to Xbox fans and explain how this technical catastrophe occurred..
Microsoft has confirmed that the recent Xbox outage should not have affected disc games. Xbox discs are subject to “rights checks” but should still be playable offline. A fix will be implemented soon to prevent this from happening again https://t.co/tV0uAPIxT7July 29, 2026
However, on July 29, 2026, Scott revealed in an interview with The Verge that the damage caused by this outage was worse than most people thought, as there were reports that physical Xbox game discs also did not work during this time.
Scott says: “We are investigating reports that some players were unable to access games using discs as expected during the service outage. Disc-based rights checks should not prevent players from accessing their games, and this is by design.”
It mentions that Xbox technical engineers discovered that there was an issue that was preventing certain Xbox consoles from, and I quote, “Correctly use saved rights during interruption” and so? “Offline mode is also designed to rely on those saved rights.”
Windows Central’s opinion
Scott says that Xbox Support is working on an update to Xbox consoles to prevent this issue from happening again, but this shows that fully investing in a digital-only future for gaming isn’t viable in the long term.
Making game discs simply “entitlement” tokens to give a player access to the digital rights to a game you download from stores instead of having the game on the discs simply shows that you don’t actually own them, and they become glorified paperweights if the Xbox Live servers suffer another outage like this again.
Even the next Microsoft “Positron” program from disk to digital that creates digital copies of physical discs won’t matter if online servers crash or if companies delisting games prevent people from actually owning and playing them.
So how do we fix this? Well, investing in GOG to get access to DRM-free games with dedicated launchers that you can safely download to your internal or external data storage drives without being beholden to online servers to play them seems like a good idea.
But that’s for keeping and owning games on PC; Console gamers don’t have the luxury of GOG. All you get now is Sony to discontinue game discs for future PlayStation systems either Microsoft blocks people from their Microsoft accounts if they are hackedcutting off access to thousands of dollars worth of games.
Honestly, I feel that if Microsoft, sonyor any other game company wants to keep our sympathy without forcing us all to resort to piracy for true game preservation, they need to go back to basics and have games on discs with no DRM or “right” conditions attached.
But what do you think? Do you think we should remove “rights” controls and DRM encryption in video games?
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