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Windows Central
Windows Central
Technology
Alexander Cope

Xbox’s biggest outage in years proved something uncomfortable — even physical discs don’t mean you truly own your games

A glowing green, shattered Xbox sphere floats above a ruined, post-apocalyptic cityscape, with a weathered game controller and disc in the foreground.

On July 27, 2026, Xbox suffered quite possibly the worst outage to its live services in recent memory. The outage lasted nearly a whole day and prevented people from signing into their profiles and launching their downloaded games and apps.

After the debacle was over, Xbox's CTO (Chief Technology Officer), Scott Van Vilet, came online to apologize to Xbox fans and explain how this technical catastrophe happened.

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