MS: XBL was down due to server problems. Duh
Category: Xbox 360, Posted: 01/10/2008 at 03:42PM CST by Frank Ling, Editorial Director
Microsoft finally came clean with the goods and admitted to what everyone already knew--Xbox Live service broke during the holidays because of a massive flood of new users and holiday gamers jumping on the grid.
Albert Penello, marketing manager at Microsoft, explained:
"We had the biggest concurrent day we've ever had on Live. We had more people than ever signing up on Live, it was 9 million, then 10 million, and it literally was that a lot more people were trying to get on, sign up and play than we had expected over Christmas."
During the outages, GamerNode speculated that Microsoft probably had a skeleton crew during Christmas and didn't have enough people on board to deal with the flood of Xbox Live users. Penello confirmed our guess and said, "It's easy when we're all [at] the office in November, but on December 25th, it's harder to get a hold of everybody."
He then added, "I hope people feel like [giving away a free Live Arcade game] is a fair make good for the inconvenience."
Xbox Live has been bludgeoned with criticism and outrage from its subscribers for the shoddy service. Penello responded by saying, "I'd also say in seven years, this has happened maybe zero other times, but I can't remember a time when, other than the slow downloads we had when we launched Video Marketplace, we have had a service outage that wasn't planned."
Regardless of whether this breakdown could have been prevented or not, we'll never know. What we do know, however, is there are still lots of unhappy campers out in Xbox Live Land, and as Penello has said, maybe that free XBL Arcade game can sooth and calm the storm.
[via kotaku]
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To my knowledge, the service has been pretty good since launch, and people throwing a paddy over a few days down time are a bit selfish, even if they have payed for the service.
Then again, WoW keeps going....
I want to know what free game we get!!!!
I hope we get to choose...
The way I figure it, they've got around 10 million XBL subscribers out there, and if they give away one game to each person at a cost of 800 MS points ($10), this whole thing will cost them somewhere in the neighborhood of $100 million dollars. Considering that they really didn't have to do a thing except say "sorry," that's a pretty good deal for XBL customers.
They don't have to do a thing other than extend peoples live subscription by the number of days it was down for.
That's it.
Agreed, at a cost of around 14 cents per day, a $10 game would be more than enough reimbursement for two months of outage and problems, even though it's only been going on a few weeks. I've been a live member since '04, and haven't had any issues like this, so it's not a big deal to me, I know they're working on it!