Microsoft's Xbox Live hit with additional outage

Visitors to the Xbox Live support page were offered the following message Wednesday.

(Credit: CNET News)

An unplanned outage hit Microsoft's Xbox Live service starting Tuesday night, leaving online gamers unable to connect.

The outage started at 8:48 p.m. PDT Tuesday, according to Microsoft. It followed an earlier scheduled maintenance to both the Zune Marketplace and Xbox Live services that ran through the night Sunday and into Monday.

Microsoft said the outage was due to an unexpected issue following the maintenance work. Visitors to Microsoft's Xbox Live support page have been offered the following status update.

"Users will not be able to connect or log into Xbox Live," Microsoft said. "We are aware of the problem and working to resolve the issue. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause."

At least for me, the Zune service appears to be working fine. I'll have more details on the Xbox outage once I get more from Microsoft.

Update, 3:05 PT: Microsoft said Wednesday afternoon that the service is back up. "Up and running," Microsoft said. "Users may experience intermittent issues posting TrueSkill statistics on Halo3. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause."

A Microsoft representative said that outages, at least intermittent ones, lasted until 1 p.m. PT (initially they said 2:30). Microsoft declined to offer any further information on the cause of the outage.

[Kwasiowusu]

Someone explain to me why Major Nelson, who runs XBOX Live, is still in business?
Everytime there is some kind of upgrade, Live goes down. When Microsoft launched the video download service a couple of years back, Live members paid for their movies, then couldn't download what they paid for. Major Nelson's pathetic excuse? " There was a bigger demand for movie download then we expected" Yeah?
Last year at Christmas, Live mebers couldn't even get into Live at all, because new buyers of the XBOX 360 tried to log on.
The same Major Nelson came up with the laughable " we sold more 360's than ecpected this Christmas, so we didn't anticipate so many people would log on to Live."
When NPD December dales figures came out, December 2007 sales werwe actually LESS than December 2006 sales, which Live was ale to cope with without any problems.
Microsoft is just becoming a great big joke.
Executives screw up constantly, and all Microsoft does is promote those who screw up, and give them a big fat bonus to boot..
But hey, if Microsoft should eventualy start going down due to executive incompetence and stupidity, good old Steve Ballmer can always start demanding that congress cough up billions of tax payer dollars to save them too.

[goodspeed8701]

moron

[Kwasiowusu]

@ goodspeed8701, you gotta do a heck of a lot better than that.
Mindless one word rejoinders just don't cut it.

[Delfairen]

@ goodspeed8701, must be an xbox live subscriber with such lengthy eloquent responses.

[DarrinThompson]

Xbox Live works perfect 99.9% of the time. When you have over 12 million people on one network things are going to happen. No one else is doing the things Microsoft is doing online. Sony and Nintendo are years behind Microsoft in online playing. A minor problem like this just brings out the haters.....No I don't work for Microsoft. I own two Xbox 360's and a Wii (that is good at collecting dust). I would purchase a PS3 if there was any reason to do so.

[umbrae]

First off, Major Nelson does not run XBOX Live. He runs a Xbox Netcast and provides information about the service. He is a marketing guy and has nothing to do with the service itself. He only reports what Microsoft says to the community: nothing more. Personal, I think he does a great job at this. It may not be what you want to hear, but its better than being in a black hole. Even E, his cohost on the Netscast, is just an engineer for XBL, and also does not have authority over the service. So this shows your ignorance in this matter.

XBL goes down very infrequently. Even during X-mas last year when they had their biggest outage, I was up and running when I needed it. I think the main problem is the DRM with some games that REQUIRE XBL to be active to even play single player, but I am not sure that is a XBL/MS issue since some games work fine when its out.

XBL outages are a bummer, but just be glad it isn't run like Twitter: otherwise, you might not even be playing online.

[Penguinisto]

Dude... this is just insane. (pretty glad I'm not paying for the privilege of accessing any of this - will MSFT give partial or prorated refunds?)

[-fjtorres-]

They have in the past.
Free games, too.

[Penguinisto]

didn't know that... pretty cool of them if they do.

[umbrae]

They give out free games and will credit your account if you complain. The XBL/Xbox division of MS is really great. I wish all their divisions ran the same way because then there would be no Mac/PC commercials.

However, a prorated cost for 2 days of an XBL outage is like 2 cents. When you put that into perspective a 2 day outage is no big; especially when it will be followed up by a major upgrade with some nice new features.

[CTO_Dude]

@ Kwasiowusu and @Penguinisto

Seriously, if I ever thought either of you "always-Microsoft-bashing" people would ever think about owning a Microsoft product, I would fall out of my chair. You are notoriously anti-Microsoft but COMPLETELY silent when any bad press around Linux or Mac comes out. So dont pretend that your comments count for anything here. When Apple's MobileMe was down for days on end, did you post a diatribe as to why people shouldn't buy Macs? NO! So put a cork in it please!

[ausernamenoonehaschosen]

When Microsoft consistently has quality control problems like they do (the xbox 360 had an estimated defect rate of the unprecedented rate of 22% at one point according to consumer reports) then I think the bashing is justified. Microsoft has had abnormally large problems with nearly all of their software and hardware, you have to be blind not to see it. Why should Live be left out.

[CTO_Dude]

Perhaps you should understand that Microsoft doesnt make the Xbox. They have vendors supply the components and most certainly some of those vendors sucked. They also went above and beyond to resolve the hardware issues and the failure rates have dropped drastically. Live has actually had an amzing uptime relative to Google and Apple.

[umbrae]

All major electronics have problem at release. The PS2 had a major problem with disc reads. The PS3 had system failures too. Sony had batteries that exploded. However, MS is the ONLY one that extended the warranty at a loss. I have a launch 360 and only had RROD once AND THIS WAS BECAUSE OF A LIGHTNING STRIKE.

There may be a design problem that eventually leads to the RROD, but it is mostly the bad decision to manufacture in China. Almost every defect from poisoned food, lead toys and bum electronics can be blamed by substandard practices by Chinese manufacturing.

Bash if you want, but I would say most people that actually own the product are happy with it.

[ausernamenoonehaschosen]

You can only blame the chinese for material or manufacturing process defects. The design of the device, which is the ulitmate cause of most failures (inappropriate heat sinking) is completely Microsoft's error. And yes, lately Apple has failed greatly, but before the iPhone 2.0 software and MobileMe they had an excellent track record.

[Penguinisto]

@CTO_Dude (or whatever sock-puppet account you're using today): Fair is fair - MobileMe (Apple) did it when their service had troubles... will MSFT?

Also - nope - don't have one, but I'll certainly get to hear about it from folks I know who do. If you don't like us in here describing exactly what's right or wrong with something, then kindly go start your own website, where you can ban us both from it at your own will and whim. Thx in advance.

/P

[CTO_Dude]

Apple did what exactly? They and Google have missed all of their SLA's. Google has been god awful at maintaining their uptime and last time I checked... open source OS was running the whole thing. So dont make it sound like MS is the only company that has occassional issues. Linux has had tons.

[Kwasiowusu]

@ CTO_Dude : "Seriously, if I ever thought either of you "always-Microsoft-bashing" people would ever think about owning a Microsoft product, I would fall out of my chair"

Get ready to fall out of our chair then, because you know what? Not only am I am not "always-Microsoft-bashing", I own a 360(bought it the same day it came out in November 2005), own a Vista laptop, use Microsoft Office, and is probably one of Microsoft's good costumers, and one of the defsenders of Microsoft on this board, when its warranted.
All that doesn't mean I should sit idly by when Microsoft continues to screw up in a a monumental fashion. When you pay good money for a service, you darn well better get that service. And when some idiotic executive at Microsoft contnues to screw costumers up time after time, after time, that executive needs to be given the boot.
Its that simple.

[CTO_Dude]

I totally disagree. Check your own history and see how often you've been positive. Although I will graciously say that you're slightly more positive than Penguinisto who is just flat out insane :)

http://www.cnet.com/8705-4_1-0-2.html?username=Kwasiowusu&rpp=10&tag=page

I have to say one other thing... you should really recheck Live Search. The relevance is exactly on par with Google and it kicks the pants off Google on Image and Video search.

[Philips]

For some reason, when another outage hits Xbox services, I recall about their claims about clustering in Advanced Server and how reliable/HA/etc it is.

I guess nothing beats bunch of cheap Linux boxes...

[elguerojose]

Wait a second. I thought it was Microsoft's policy never to comment on the status on XBL.

http://www.engadget.com/2008/01/14/lawsuit-forces-microsoft-to-stay-mum-about-xbox-live-status/
http://www.mcvuk.com/news/29315/Lawsuit-blocking-Xbox-Live-status-updates

I'm sure Larry wouldn't make an argument of convenience, so I assume this means that there are no lawsuits anywhere right now that relate to XBL.