Microsoft says physical discs should not have stopped working during the Xbox outage — clarifies issue with entitlement checks that failed to read licenses correctly, update on the way

⚡ Quick Hits

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• Physical Xbox game discs failed to load during a recent server outage.
• The issue stemmed from an unintended bug in the system's license entitlement checks.
• Microsoft confirmed this behavior was a mistake and an update is currently on the way.

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Greetings, deal hunters and tech enthusiasts! The Tech Monk is back with an important clarification regarding your game libraries.

If you tried popping a disc into your console during the recent Xbox network outage, you might have been greeted with an unpleasant surprise: your physical games simply refused to play. Naturally, this sparked massive community concerns about always-online DRM creeping into physical media.

Fortunately, Microsoft has officially cleared the air. The company clarified that physical discs should not have been affected by the server downtime. The outage exposed a frustrating bug in the console's entitlement checks, which essentially failed to read offline licenses correctly when the network dropped.

The good news for physical media purists is that this was an error, not a policy change. Microsoft has acknowledged the glitch and confirmed that a system update is currently on the way to patch the issue. Once the update rolls out, your physical discs will function exactly as they are supposed to—completely independent of server status. Keep those disc collections safe, and stay tuned for the patch!