It's no secret at this point that the original Xbox and Xbox 360 are two consoles that have been hacked in all sorts of ways over the years — it's generally just what happens to older systems as hackers begin to understand how they work.
In fact, there have been many examples where consoles have been hacked while they're being readily sold in stores (the PSP was a notable victim), and that's why Microsoft really went the extra mile to make the Xbox One as unhackable as possible. In fact, security engineer Tony Chen did a big presentation on this back in 2019, pointing out all the ways that he and his Xbox team worked to secure the Xbox One compared to previous Xbox systems.
The result is a console that's taken over 12 years to properly hack, but someone has finally managed to do it. In an hour-long presentation at RE//verse 2026 recently, security researcher Markus Gaasedelen explained in very technical detail about how he managed to crack the Xbox One, which is now being referred to as the "Bliss" exploit.
You can watch the full presentation below:
Alternatively, YouTuber MVG does a great job of summing it all up in the video at the top of this article, in which he explains that the hack relates to the Xbox One's boot ROM. From what we can gather, it uses voltage glitching to attack the boot ROM and perform a hardware-level exploit, which means that even if Xbox tried to patch the issue via software, it's not going to be enough to block this method from working again in the future.
Gaasedelen: "This talk explores what it's like to hunt dragons and take on the task that many wrote off as impossible... this is basically a god mode hardware hack that cannot be patched."
"There's a lot of layers to the Xbox One, I only care about the boot ROM. That's what I studied. And if we compromise the boot ROM, we compromise everything."
What it doesn't mean is that everyone is suddenly going to start hacking their Xbox One consoles though. This is a very difficult glitch to pull off, with multiple hardware modifications required, and it's not something any old Xbox One owner would want to try. It only works on the 2013 model as well, and not the later Xbox One S or X models.
It's something Microsoft would frown on too, so we definitely wouldn't recommend hacking your Xbox console(s) in general. That said, the level of technical prowess here is admittedly impressive, and this could open up the floodgates for the Xbox One hacking scene in years to come. Whatever happens, it'll certainly be interesting to observe from afar.