New Delhi, July 28 -- SEATTLE - A player who inserted a disc into their Xbox Saturday evening was told the game would not launch. Not a problem with the disc. Not a corrupted download. The hardware recognized the physical media, but the authentication server that Microsoft requires to confirm the console's right to play it was offline. Xbox's network had gone down, and the platform's always-on verification system made no exception for physical copies.

The outage stretched past 12 hours by Monday morning, with Xbox confirming on its Live Status page that "account sign-ins, the digital storefront, apps, and games" were affected across Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, and Xbox 360. Microsoft said engineers were "actively working to mitigate the i...