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In May 2022, a rare failure of Xbox’s authentication servers prevented many players from accessing their games. Xbox Digital Rights Management (DRM) is a system that verifies that you actually own the games installed on your console, partly to prevent people from making copies for free. The DRM also allows you to access your content on other Xbox consoles that aren’t necessarily your home Xbox, so you can play with friends and family in other places.

The outage led to many questions about: how and when people can play games offline because without active authentication servers many online games became inaccessible. In this article, I’ll detail the steps you need to take to make sure you can actually access your content during those rare Xbox outages. The following information is relevant to all Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, and Xbox One consoles.

Check if your games support offline play

Xbox game library

Source: Windows Central (Image credit: Source: Windows Central)

Obviously, games that require online services to play won’t work during an outage, be it on Xbox’s side or your own internet. Games like Overwatch, Fortnite, Call of Duty, and so on generally require online servers to be played, although in the case of Call of Duty, you may be able to play the offline single-player campaign mode even without online services running.