XBOX's Massive Outage Sparks Plenty of Reactions

Xbox outage rendered consoles useless, sparking debate on the future of game ownership.
Both physical and digital gamers faced issues, undermining arguments for either format.
Calls for improved game preservation tactics and true ownership, not just leasing, from Sony, Xbox, and Nintendo.

A massive outage that began on Sunday and went into Monday had XBOX console owners seeing red instead of green.

In a time where all signs point to a fully digital future for gaming, XBOX gamers had to endure a significant outage that basically turned their consoles into expensive bricks.

Yes, the outage shined a bright spotlight on the huge issue of having an all-digital library, as it rendered them useless, but physical game disc warriors were not spared either, according to reports.

Per The Verge:

An extended Xbox outage that began Sunday evening didn’t just cause issues for people trying to play digital games — it blocked people from playing their disc-based games, too.

Xbox’s status page initially reported the outage on Sunday at about 11 PM ET, and it also prevented people from logging in, launching apps, or finding games on the Xbox store. This morning, the page also noted that users “may have problems” playing their digital and disc games, which posts on social media confirmed. During that time, my colleague Richard Lawler was able to launch digital games he owned, but trying to boot up games tied to Game Pass popped up error code 0x87e107df, indicating the license couldn’t be verified.

In a post on X (formerly Twitter), XBOX acknowledged the issue was resolved, writing in the post, “You should once again be able to launch games, sign in, and complete purchases. Thanks for sticking with us through a long one.” The status page also says that “All services up and running.”

Scott Van Vliet, XBOX’s Chief Technology Officer, Spoke On The Outage

XBOX chief technology officer Scott Van Vliet also weighed in on the matter, calling it “an unacceptable situation” in a post on X.

Welp.

So, in a nutshell, this means gamers who are out here fighting for the survival of physical game discs and those who fully embrace going digital can’t win.

What this massive outage also highlights is that argument shouldn’t be about saving those plastic discs, but that both Sony, XBOX, and Nintendo need to improve game preservation tatics and truly fix the ownership aspect, because it sure as hell seems we are just leasing these games at this point, not actually owning them, even after paying $60 and in some cases $100 for them.

XBOX’s outage comes just days after PlayStation also endured a global service disruption.

You can see what the video game streets had to say about the XBOX outage below.