External Licensing Service Caused Near-Full-Day Xbox Outage; Disc-Based Games Also Failed

Xbox's July 27, 2026 near-full-day outage stemmed from a failure at an external licensing service outside Xbox's infrastructure. The dependency cascaded platform-wide and also broke disc-based game play: a local entitlement cache meant to enable offline disc use failed, leaving consoles unable to verify ownership. Xbox technology chief Scott Van Vliet confirmed a fix is coming in a future console update.