Xbox Live Service over the Holiday

I got hit with Xbox Live flakiness over the weekend myself.  I had two friends pick up an Xbox for Christmas so this was their first time using XBL.  They both had problems signing up and wound up doing it over the phone.  Then we had problems trying to get a Rockband session going.  After reading the forums I found the work around.  If you loaded up a game and then signed into XBL you could get in.   If you tried to do it from the dashboard you would time out usually. 

This was the first time I have ever run into any hiccups with XBL and that is going back to the original Xbox days.  Needless to say I definitely felt like I had pie in my face this weekend.  But judging from the numbers I am hearing about for new signups I can see why.  Very glad to hear that we are giving something back to the community for the problems that occurred.  Wonder what game it will be...

Here is the blurb from Marc Whitten, GM of Xbox Live:

An Open Letter from Marc Whitten about Xbox LIVE this Holiday

Published January 3, 2008

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

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