Debunk: Xbox Live was down, but not due to DDoS attack
By Ryan Block 
posted January 4th 2008 3:21AM
posted January 4th 2008 3:21AM
The obvious answer as to why Xbox Live has been up and down (but mostly down) over the last couple of weeks is, of course, that the service has undergone a massive distributed denial of service attack. (Feel free to blame the illusory Sony / Nintendo fanboys, if you must.) Naturally, we're already starting to see some of those rumors catch hold, in no small part due to the fact that while GM of Xbox Live Marc Whitten did offer a free game for peoples' trouble in his public memo a few hours ago, he didn't speak to the cause of the outages. We did, however, get some conclusive inside information from a trusted source, and confidently relay to curious Live users that the issues were not at all related to a malicious attack. Yeah, we know, it tones down the drama quite a bit (and actually makes the Xbox team look a little worse than if they were attacked), but the speculation that the service was out due to a two week long internet assault? The stuff of myth.
Who cares? If you want to get locked in to a singel wendor, a singel platform, please us Microsoft Xbox and Xbox live. The same goes for PS3 and Wii. Use a PC and you will stay happy.
the same goes for apple and itunes. don't get locked into one vendor and one platform.
He did say the cause of the outages...
"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."
"conclusive inside information from a trusted source" SUUURE
I don't understand why everyone is so surprised that it wasn't a DoS attack...
The holidays will always be the most popular time to play online (I would expect by a substantial amount). Account for that, plus thousands of brand new subscriptions (and all of last years re-subscriptions), and COD4 to top it off...
I am surprised it has gone on for so long, though...
Blame Canada!
There are many botnets available, often they are dormant until someone that has control of it uses it, it should be trivial for such a person to initiate an attack on most any target reachable by internet.
So I don't quite see what would make that unlikely.
As for this 'reliable source' thing, a reliable source who is employed by MS? interesting definition of reliable there ;)
How is someone that works at ms not a reliable source? I'd think that if they're going to say anything, they'll say what's up. Those big kinda companies seem to get a lot more shit for lying about stuff.
Observe history and then see if you dare repeat that.
Clearly their servers were hit with all those 3-6 month old 360s logging on at once for the first time and getting the dash update. However, has anyone considered general internet network performance ? I for one noticed a distinct slow down in page retrieval speed over my regular comcast cable connected PC during the holidays - just too much traffic online as your average fat arsed american (me included) sat googling crap to pass the time.
No one considers the performance of the general network and local telco / cable provider do they ?
The official response isn't good enough. For a subscription service I expect more in terms of notifying users of the service disruptions. I hope there is a backlash against MS. At this stage I'm not going to renew my sub again. Fuck MS
I don't know why Xbox.com and all else are acting like this is over. I'm still having these same issues. Since 10:15pm or so my time, it's down. Network problems AGAIN. I better not be the only one. Is anyone else still having issues? I'm at the point where I don't give a crap about a free arcade game. I just want my COD4 the way it was intended. I was really looking forward to a vacation filled with 360, but it's been very much the opposite.