The Reboot

I just received this letter from Marc Whitten, General Manager of Xbox LIVE, and the folks at Gamerscore News regarding the problems some gamers had with the Xbox Live service during the holidays. Looks like ALL XBL members will be getting a free arcade game for their troubles.

Dear Xbox LIVE Members:

During this past holiday season you helped us break a number of Xbox LIVE records. This included our largest sign-up of new members to Xbox LIVE in our 5 year history and just yesterday you broke the record for the single biggest day of concurrent members ever on the service.

As a result of this massive increase in usage we know that some of you experienced intermittent Xbox LIVE issues over the holiday break. While the service was not completely offline at any given time, we are disappointed in our performance. I would like to take this moment to thank you each and every one of you for your patience and understanding as our team has worked around the clock to return the service to a stable state.

At the same time we would like to offer a token of our appreciation to all of you in celebration of record success for the service. And as a thank you for your loyalty during this holiday period, we will be offering all of our Xbox LIVE members around the world access to a full Xbox LIVE Arcade game that will be available to download free of charge. In the coming weeks we will be sharing the specific details of this offer with you.

Thank you again for helping make Xbox LIVE everything that it is today!

Sincerely,

Marc Whitten
General Manager, Xbox LIVE
Gamertag: Notwen

Last month, some XBL users were having trouble signing on and joining multiplayer games. As stated in the letter above, Microsoft attributed the problems to the increase usage of the XBL service during the holidays. I was actually experiencing some issues logging on after Xmas, but it wasn’t that bad IMO. Good to see Microsoft take care of its gamers…gotta love anything that’s free-99, especially a game!

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 3rd, 2008 at 11:07 pm and is filed under Xbox 360, Gaming.