Gamers bereft as Xbox Live takes a dive

Microsoft's Xbox Live service is down, apparently across the world, and Redmond is trying to sort out the problems so gamers can get their Friday fix. The Xbox support team confirmed the outage in a Twitter message at 5:20UT, and thanked users for their patience on the status page. The Zune network is also down (not that that …

[Steven Raith]

Customer Service

....There it is.

We have a problem, we're looking at it, we've made the message slightly humourous for your entertainment and hopeful appeasement.

Who needs PR when you have people with poking sticks?

Steven R

[Anonymous Coward]

Slowly but surely, here and there cracks appear in the system, first the bank account meltdown, BT broadband failures, amazon, XBox. Slowly but surely it begins to overload, creaking and groaning until one after the other the system collapses, first a street, then a town, then a county, then a country until finally the world.

Is this the beginning of the end?

[Steve Davies 3]

Like a pack of cards then?

Lets hope that the players from Redmond haven't stacked the deck then...

[Jelliphiish]

well..

no, not really.

[thomas newton]

first we have 'bath salts' turning people into flesh eating zombies

now this...I'm off to find a nice cosy bunker somewhere and wait it out...there's a storm coming in...quite literally, if the weather is anything to go by.

[The Brave Sir Robin]

Winter is coming

And even so they make me write a post which must contain letters the Others take them.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Customer Service

But the fanbois might get their pitchforks out.

[g e]

Maybe it was an Android botnet

Oh hang on that was actually bullshit... and Terry Zink turned out to be Rinky-Dink

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-18734852

Maybe the same guys run XBL as do their email forensics...

[squilookle]

Ha! I have no broadband this evening so wouldn't have noticed. Coincidence, or conspiracy to keep me from gaming online?

Tin foil hat icon please.

[Tank boy]

http://i0.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/008/305/its-a-conspiracy.jpg

[Anonymous Coward]

And job applications to work in the Xbox PR team increase by god knows how many %?

[Alien Doctor 1.1]

Bastards

"Don't panic everyone! #Xboxlive is just having a little doze! The teams are currently trying to poke it with a big stick to wake it back up!"

What condescending bastards - that seems to be typical now of help-desks that continually screw customers over with meaningless drivel.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Bastards

Better than Apple who just stay silent leaving you wondering what is going on

[Anonymous Coward]

It wouldn't matter so much if this was a free service, but it's a subscription service.

[toadwarrior]

Must hurt to have your paid for service go down. I'm not that bother if the PS3 network is having problems but it is free.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: In fairness...

Up and Down all the time, including the huge two week outage.

The only difference is it doesn't get the press that PSN gets, simply because the press fear Microsoft, and the American gaming press choose to support the American console with cherry picked news.

I have both and both services are on par for downtime.

[GeorgeTuk]

Re: In fairness...

Don't be silly.

[RICHTO]

No, its just like XBL - in that you have both free and paid for access levels.

At least XBL runs on a secure platofrm like Windows Azure, so wasnt hacked to shreds and shut down for weeks on end....

[Helix]

Very inconvenient, when Live is down, you also can't play your saved games that are in the cloud storage.

[Anonymous Coward]

Imagine that

When the authentication service goes down that matches you to your cloud data you can't access it. I can't tell you how surprised that doesn't make me

[Helix]

Re: Imagine that

The xbox keeps a local copy of the cloud stored savefiles, so in theory you can play but you won't be able to synch with the cloud storage, it's just that MS doesn't allow it.

[Jeebus]

Yes.

Just to be safe you should end it for yourself and your family in a murder-suicide pact right now. Spare the suffering in the long run and if it isn't then everyone is a winner.

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's hope it's not like the last 2 week outage...

http://www.engadget.com/2008/01/03/xbox-live-outage-day-13-still-up-and-down-still-preventing-fu/

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Let's hope it's not like the last 2 week outage...

What, the last outage in 2008?

Get a fucking grip. That was four years ago.

[RICHTO]

Re: Let's hope it's not like the last 2 week outage...

That was a few very interminent issues over a 2 week period, not a 2 week outage...

[LizardATwar]

Normal Service is resumed

Apparently, the word on FB is that its back up again.

Clever Microsoft Bods - the stick apparently worked!

[Miek]

Re: Normal Service is resumed

Probably just turned it all off and on again.

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the same

when I see Xbox retards talking about Sony "rootkits" from 8 years ago...