An Xbox outage began on Sunday evening, July 26, 2026, affecting account sign-ins, the digital storefront, apps, and both digital and disc-based games. The disruption lasted around 20 hours, with issues first reported at about 11PM ET on Sunday.

Xbox's status page stated that players 'may have problems' playing digital and disc-based games. An error code 0x87e107df appeared when users tried to launch Game Pass games during the outage. The incident also impacted backward compatibility features.

Scott Van Vliet, Xbox chief technology officer, stated that the outage was caused by an external licensing service that started failing late Sunday night. He explained that disc entitlements are saved locally for offline use, but the system did not work correctly. Microsoft's documentation states that games with full disc support should be available for offline use.

Microsoft posted that things were slowly improving, though players worldwide may still experience failures launching games, along with potential sign-in and purchase issues. Disc-based games were reported to be working again later on July 27.

Van Vliet said on X that service was restored as of 2:30 PM PDT on July 27 (5:30 PM ET). However, Xbox confirmed issues were mitigated at 6:48 PM ET on July 27, stating: 'You should once again be able to launch games, sign in, and complete purchases.' This discrepancy likely reflects different stages of service resolution. The Xbox status page later stated: 'All services up and running.'

Van Vliet told The Verge that disc-based entitlement checks should not prevent players from accessing their games and that a fix will arrive in an upcoming update. He said Xbox is carrying out a review of the 'unacceptable situation' after a single point of failure disrupted services.

Industry context and layoffs

The outage occurred weeks after Xbox announced major layoffs. Xbox laid off 1,600 workers and announced plans to cut an additional 1,600 jobs by the end of June 2027.

Sony plans to cease production of physical PlayStation game discs by 2028, no longer releasing new games on discs from January 2028. Rockstar Games announced that physical copies of GTA 6 will contain a code for digital download rather than a disc. Nintendo introduced Game-Key Cards, physical cartridges that act as keys to download games.

Jez Corden, executive editor of Windows Central, said Sony's decision to stop selling physical games had 'put digital rights under a microscope.' He said that the broader industry discussions around digital rights are separate from the specific Xbox outage, though Scott Ross, co-founder of Stop Killing Games, said: 'The problem is the industry has a very poor reputation of disabling games once they end support.'

Xbox is testing a feature to grant users a digital copy of games that they own on disc. PlayStation Network suffered an outage on July 24, 2026.