I know days seem like weeks in this timeline, but it was just last month when Xbox had their massive outage. After that, they tried to explain that the outage was caused by something. Something went wrong and we need to fix that thing that went wrong. This week, we got a bit more information as to what went wrong. Or, at least, that what went wrong was a bigger deal than first thought.

If you recall, the outage took down users ability to log in, see their game libraries, and worse, even from launching previously downloaded games. However, it was reported that physical games were having issues loading, as well. Xbox is reporting that it was a “cascading issues with library enumeration.” That is something no one wants to hear. Xbox CTO Scott Van Vliet has reported that the issue has been fixed.

Good to know.

“An underlying service required for XBOX Home Console sharing and Game Pass purchased content, as well as some PC scenarios, experienced an outage whereby an update to the system put some services in an unresponsive state,” writes Van Vliet on his X account, explaining the cause of the problems. But this was then exacerbated by the bug in “the XBOX client software stack.” (The software stack is Xbox’s way of running three cooperating operation systems at the same time.) This “caused other license checks to also fail when that first service went down. These two issues created some cascading failure scenarios that affected some players’ ability to launch games and causing cascading issues with library enumeration.”

Xbox Outage Bug Fixed

So, the issue was blamed on the system being unable to check for licenses before launching the games. This marks a bigger question is why did this affect physical media. I mean, reluctantly, I understand why it did it with games you downloaded onto your Xbox.

“We are transitioning ownership of the underlying licensing service to the XBOX team while our engineers are actively hardening the services and infrastructure for future updates,” Van Vliet explains. “The client bug has been fixed in an upcoming release, which starts rolling out today, August 10, and becomes mandatory August 17.”

So the issue is “fixed”. At least, according to Microsoft. Now, this is a stark reminder that Xbox can easily limit access to your digital content. Even with their plan to allow you to play games you bought by digital means with Project Helix. Which means, you do own the game. The physical one, that is. What happens when they refuse to let you access the digital version?

Even if we take a step further and believe that the issue is fixed. It is Microsoft. The update to “fix the issue” is rolling out and will need to be updated by your console. This issue should remind you that you don’t own anything unless you can hold it in your hand. But, even then.