16-hour Xbox outage even stopped physical games from working — company blames licensing issue for incident that prohibited gaming across three generations of console

Microsoft said an external licensing service failure caused a roughly 16-hour Xbox outage starting late July 26.

The outage blocked sign-ins, library access, and game launches across Xbox 360, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S.

Service was restored on July 27 after Microsoft fixed the issue and updated its status page.

The incident highlighted how Xbox access, including some disc-based games, can depend on online entitlement checks.