Mohsen Baqery is a Staff Writer at GameRant based in Turkey. He mainly covers video game news and industry features while occasionally publishing guides and listicles. Mohsen started his journey into video game journalism by self-publishing reviews of games he loved, which led to freelance work for smaller online publications and launched his professional writing career.
Xbox technology chief Scott Van Vliet has addressed reports of discs not working during the recent outage, calling it a problem that shouldn’t have happened in the first place. The Xbox outage began on July 27 and lasted for nearly 24 hours, during which players experienced widespread network and login issues.
The Xbox support team resolved the issues on July 28, and Xbox Live services appear to be working normally at the time of writing. However, many fans were concerned that the outage also left physical copies of offline games unplayable. For many, it raised concerns about the challenges gamers could face in an all-digital future. Fortunately, Xbox has reassuring news for players regarding physical discs.
Xbox Discs Should Remain Playable During Outages, and That’s by Design
In a statement provided to The Verge, Xbox technology chief Scott Van Vliet said, “Disc-based entitlement checks should not prevent players from accessing their games, and this is by design.” He explained that the recent Xbox network outage was primarily caused by “an external licensing service,” which also affected how entitlement checks worked on the console. According to Van Vliet, the issue has been resolved, and Xbox discs should continue to work offline as they are intended.
