Xbox Live having trouble. Again. On Christmas day.
By Ryan Block 
posted Dec 25th 2007 6:38PM
posted Dec 25th 2007 6:38PM
We hear a lot of people are having problems with Xbox Live today (we're not, for the record), but if you're feeling a bit sheepish about giving the gift of a 360 + Live service to a loved one, just imagine how Microsoft must feel. The service -- which we'd like to remind everyone is paid, unlike the competition's -- has been up and down since Christmas weekend. And it's not some surprise that there would be an influx of users today, nor is it any mystery to Microsoft how many Live accounts and Xboxes were sold over the past couple of weeks -- which is precisely why this kind of thing is so annoying. Thankfully, it seems to be a bit less widespread than last weekend's outage. Feel free to shout it out in comments.[Thanks, Peter]
Read - Xbox Live status
Read - Outage on Xbox Live Forums (again)
damn it i thought it was sony s sabotage but no it s the freaking wee oops sorry it s we nope wee or wathever no i v e got it wii
Wtf is this?
It's someone trying to be funny or facetious -- but they never learned how to spell or form coherent sentences.
Grammatical NIGHTMARE!
Give him a break - he's only 11 years old.
The Wii online service was also affected these past few days with new customers.
I was showing off my Wii (which I've had since last Spring) and was embarrassed that the online access was unresponsive, slow, and often produced errors.
Chalk it up to holiday traffic.
d@mn, sorry Ryan! I disagreed with your logic, but sure as hell you were right about it not being solved soon. It's been up 'mostly' here ... but even while watching TV through it as an extender, I could see it kick the account periodically. It would be a disappointing first experience if I just got it today.
Where the heck can a guy buy a standard Wii setup (instead of the $800 packages) without having to keep relying on luck!? yeah yeah hate me, but it makes more sense for my 5 year old.
yeah earlier today me& pals were having problems over XBL saturday afternoon with COD4. they said its been like this for days. i hope ppl realize how good we have most of the time in our lives.
Microsoft needs to invest in more workers and servers. Usually live is wonderful but whenever there's a major game or patch launch it becomes a pain for a week or so. I suppose the same thing happens with everyone shopping for Christmas.
yeah, when halo 3 launched so many people jumped on LIVE (probably over 2 million) that LIVE was crashed for much of launch day, and laggy for a little while after.
however, everything seems fine now. i was just playing halo 3 on LIVE a couple hours ago and had zero issues and zero lag.
oh and i would like to point something out. i don't understand why people even bother pointing out that you have to pay for Xbox LIVE. i mean, c'mon. $50 per year works out to less than $1 per week. less than 14 cents per day. you could pay for LIVE by picking up coins off the streets.
In addition to bitching about the cost, they then demand more servers/personnel/magic network bullets.
My advice: Get over it, it will be fixed soon. Christmas day is family time - remember why you all buy presents for each other and quit being a bunch of whiners. Merry Christmas!
totally agree!!! don't yall think its going to be fixed by at most tommorow??? Ohh God!! 24 hours w/o xbox!?!?!? What ever shall I do!!!
I don't celebrate Xmas...so ya..I want to play now.
Yet your name is Jesus. Ironic, huh?
@Jonathan,
One of the few things in life we cannot choose is our own name.
@ Ricardo
i think he knows that, and didnt really mean anything by it. but it is a bit ironic dont you think?
@ Ricardo
i think he knows that, and didnt really mean anything by it. but it is a bit ironic dont you think?
You CAN choose your name
Actually Jesus would want nothing to do with this pagan holiday. Just do a search about Christmas, any real Christian would keep far away from it.
@boostjunkie: WRONG. What the hell is wrong with you. Jesus is behind ANYTHING that promotes a sense of good will and peace on Earth. He doesn't care what you call it or when you celebrate it, as long as people take the time to recognize those qualities at least ONCE each year, he is all for it.
Get over it? Yea I dunno about that- my ISP never has issues like this and they do a lot more heavy lifting than XBOX live and it costs $50.
@DarkLightConnection
please, jesus (heh.), tell me your joking.
are you referring to the fact that jesus actually MAKES the good on the earth?
or are you just trying to push your religion on everyone reading engadget.*
i hope its the first since theres a medical diagnosis, and pills, for that.
but if its the latter, oh lord (heh once more.) save us.
*i, to be quite frank, don't care for anyones religion (or mine for that matter), nor am i racist, but when you start acting like jesus makes me help an old lady cross the street, or give money to charities ....
oops that was at luis. my bad darklight
Actually December 25th originated from a Roman festive holiday thing. It's actually NOT Jesus's birthday lol.
Actually December 25th was the pagan festival of the sun god. This is why in some images Jesus is depicted with a glow behind him. Some believe this is because the original imagery was of the sun god and not Jesus. It is also believed that a smart Roman emperor declared that Jesus's birthday was actually December 25th to try and separate the Christians form the traditional Jews.
But given how often the way we mark the passing of the years has changed since those days who could say for sure? And frankly these days who cares? Christmas these days is more about worshipping presents than any religious figure. Oh and the time of year for attention seekers to cover their houses in tacky lights.
el numero uno
tha shall not frag thee on my birthday nor shall there be any killing therefore i shut down xbl
Threadjack: Congrats Ryan for making Forbes top 25 Kings and Queens of the web for 2007
http://www.forbes.com/technology/2007/12/18/web-celeb-fame-tech-cx_de_07webceleb_1218top_slide.html?partner=abcnews
hey mat i see you are spending sometime with the familly very good
Ha ha!
Chock one up for the pc gamers and others who don't play on subscription services!
Yay!
this is pretty awful. I have a gold subscription and i had problems with live all of sunday, but other than that i haven't had problems. I just hope I'm able to connect tonight though. The worst thing about this situation is that instead of entire areas experiencing difficulties with live its only random gamers. For example, when there was that major outage on Sunday, I wasn't able to connect, whereas my friend who lives 2 blocks away was able to connect and stay on all day. It's really annoying considering the fact that you have to recover your account all over again.
No problems here. Just got my sister's boyfriend's account on Live just tonight. Worked without a hitch.
well I gotta wait until I try Live anyways, so it's all good .
Here ya go: I'm ebaying my 360, the HD-DVD player, 2 white wireless controllers, 2 black wireless controllers, the two-battery charging station, two 1600pt (xmas) gift cards, plus 10 games (including Halo 1, 2 & 3, and CoD4), one white wireless headset and a never opened Halo 3 controller with Halo 3 wireless headset.
Ofcourse, the auction will start once I get my 360 returned from MS repair depot after a RRoD! (that will mean a 90-Day warranty included, with 2 years left on the RRoD issue).
advertise your crap someplace else.
@vuph: Yes, exactly. It is crap. M$ crap. Suck it. And I am hardly advertising it here. More like a rant and vent. Shove that up your chimney!
I wonder if it could be a DOS attack on the Live servers; be a good time to get some mud on MS's face if you had a grudge and a bot network.
The Internet is not 100% reliable 24/7. The outage will be temporary. I have been a live user since day one and have had my frustrations. At this time I am enjoying COD4 and loving it.
Well, I'm not having any problems. So i say, thats what you get for being a late adopter.
As am I on my PS3 with no problems............ever.
Have fun on your PS3 with no problems. Yeah, my linux server that sits around and never does anything has no problems too.
I've literally only just been kicked off 10 mins ago, after signing on around 10PM (GMT). So for 5 hours it's worked great for me. I wish people would stop whining, so you lose a few hours here and there, what about the rest of the year? You still get your superior service, compared to PSN, which works very well.
Seriously, maybe spend some time with the people who bought you live? Unless you bought it for yourself in which case that would be icky.
You know you always hear so many people dissing the PS3 and saying how great the xbox is, but when something like this happens to the xbox 360 everyone shuts up.
Well i'd like to say that i support the PS3 (and not that i hate the xbox 360, that would only bring me down to THEIR level) but now i can say this though... HA HA now your system sucks.
if there are any PS3 fanboys out there, just tell the haters to shut up and go play their own system... oh wait they can't play! too bad.
Genesis for life, and don't you forget it.
I have a XBOX 360 and I can play :-D
Online isn't everything... there's something called "Artificial Intelligence", and it's there on every game, in case you didn't know :-)
@DarkLightConnection
You are so right there is artificial intelligence. Playstation 3 users have to use it ALL the time. For the Xbox, it's an alternative.
:-D
"You are so right there is artificial intelligence. Playstation 3 users have to use it ALL the time"
No we don't. We have free online multiplayer. 360 users use AI more than PS3 users, since
but then again PSN is dead and no one is on it, so what problems could it have? there's more XBL subscribers than PS3 owners... LMAO
That explains why I couldnt keep in the same party for more than one match.
The Wii Shop channel has been DOGGIN too... i keep getting loss connection errors when I try to download the gift someone sent me!!!!!
Its happened in to different locations.
This is a prime example why companies that know what they are doing do not run Windows Server in a high volume, clustered environment. This is Microsoft and video games aren't exactly mission critical, but you do not hear about outages to this extent on stock exchanges.
You mean like how Nasdaq runs on Windows?
Nasdaq does NOT run Windows.
Ignorant statement. Windows networks are fine in large enviroments. The mistake people make is not hiring staff that knows what their doing making the assumption that Windows Server enviroments are hands off like XP is. It's not. Hire real admins and your Windows network will be just fine.
When xbox live is responsible for the world economy, you won't hear about outages there either.
Wasn't too big a deal to me - all I wanted was the Dashboard update (shows how much I get on Live). Besides, I had some solo missions to play on Ace Combat 6.
Works fine for me.
I just set it up for my nephews. The first time I tried to create an Xbox Live account, it got an error. I waited 10 minutes and tried again and it worked fine
I wonder if this is something to do with the recent Dashboard update. Sometimes, since the update, I have had my 360 crash my router (I plug it directly into the modem when I'm home alone and playing online) so I think that since the update the 360 is making multiple connections to Live at start up or something as equally weird.
We should get credited for the hours because we pay for the service
come on Tim, you really want a refund for the 5 hours you couldn't play live? Don't be a cheapskate. If you actually figure it out, you pay $50.00 per year, divided by 365 days = 13.69 CENTS per day. So we'll get right on that and get you your refund for 2.9 CENTS right out to you...lol
ok that was supposed to be meant for a joke. im not that much of a cheapskate
It doesn't matter for me. On Christmas Eve, I got the Red Ring of Death. QQ.
I have said it before and I will say it again. MS pays 65% of the industry standard. You do that, you only get 65% of the results. It use to be that you could make up the difference in stock, but now, all the good people are gone and all you have left are old-timers and interns.
- Roger
As a data point- a friend of mine started his career with a BS in CS at ~$85K salary in the Silicon Valley as a software engineer in test... is that honestly 65% of industry pay?
Not that his pay is correlated to the Live team, but MS has pretty damn good salaries from what I've seen.
Or, maybe we should all go get a PlayStation 3! I have one, and guess what? The servers have never been down nor do I have to pay a dollar! But if only the console and games were cheaper...
You get what you pay for and the PS3 online experience is definately worth what you pay for it.
Live uses peer to peer, PSN uses dedicated servers.
Um, Live you pay to use your own bandwidth, PSN you don't pay and you're using someone elses.
You are not getting what you pay for on Live. And on PSN you're getting far more than what you pay for
You do realize that dedicated servers aren't all that great right? Peer to Peer makes it where a game is playable online with other users until there is no one left playing. Once a company decides to shut down its dedicated servers then that game no longer has multiplayer functionality. The other problem with dedicated is your ping is heavilty influenced on the location of the dedicated server. So if you live god knows where you are f'd.
Once PSN gets the number of users that LIVE has then PSN will start crumbling. LIVE does a lot more then PSN if you think about it. Nearly all LIVE users use voice over the network because of the fact that the mic is included with nearly every system. With the PS3 you have to use a Bluetooth headset that you have to buy seperately which means there is ALOT less voice chat going on meaning much less bandwidth being needed.
I could go on about little differences that most people don't talk about or think of on why LIVE is quite a bit better and is completely worth the $50 a year, but then the die hard PS3 Fanboys might throw a fit as usual.
$50 a year for jack shit.
Seriously MS, you need to learn what a premium service is and make Live Gold a real premium service. Not just ordinary service that you have to pay for.
So it's been down for what? Two or three days the whole year? As others have said at 14c a day (for Americans) you get a damn good service. If you don't like paying then drop down to one of the free packages.
It's already up and running now.
Ho, ho, ho. Merry X(box)mas.
Too bad my Xbox is in for repairs, I would have liked to experience this momentous moment. Oh, wait...
its funny, because when I come to this site to read on an article, I get caught up reading everyone's comments and how off-topic they are.
alot of xbox's in for repairs ... i feel sorry for those people .. tch tch tch
ps3 wtg free online and no server down time jus the occasional lag = happiness
xbox ..overheats.. paid online .. still lags.. and this server crash = suicide
[END]
It's always the us and them thing with consoles. Sad. I've got all 3 and the fact of the matter is I would never choose my PS3 over my 360 for an online game, free or not. In fact I have yet to choose my PS3 over my 360 for a multi format game period.
Also FYI Lag has nothing to do with Xbox Live or PSN, as the "servers" that you play on are the people in the game. So the lag is purely down to whether or not you get a buffoon who is downloading whilst hosting a game or something.
It appears that live cannot support more than 10 people on at once without the serverse imploding leaving a black hole where they once stood.
I was playing on Live without issue through the first "problems" and again, no issue for me yesterday either. I also saw quite a few of my friends online. I wonder if this was a full-on Live problem or if it was just a problem sporadically to small areas of the country?
Yeah my connection went dead in the middle of HALO 3. It took a good 15 minutes to come back up.
I was getting a lot of lag on WOW today.
This is crap. Xbox Live has been down for so long, and here I thought it was my internet connection!
Regardless, as a company with millions of dollars (not to mention that it charges it's users), Microsoft should've seen this coming and prepared for it.
Now, if XBL was FREE like Nintendo Wii's online service - hey, no complaints here (sure, it may be laggy at times, but I didn't put in any extra money)... In short, shame on Microsoft.
(It's times like these why I know I've been stocking up on free 48hr passes, that way I don't have to get annoyed at shoddy service)
This is what happened to me Christmas morning:
I open my newly xbox 360 with glee, only to plug it i and find out its not working.
The reason why?
It came with the euro power supply. Gad dang it microsoft. 200-240 volts is not my house!
Well I 2 Have Been Having Problems with xbox live. but as l am happy enough to continusly click find match on my games it dose get rather annoyin when u get disconnected half way through a game. but oh well l hope ou get the problem sorted soon