Microsoft's Xbox Live, Zune services to be down simultaneously this Monday

Simmer down folks -- everything is going to be a-okay. Yes, 'tis true -- Microsoft has indeed scheduled for Xbox Live service maintenance and Zune service tweakage to take place at the exact same time this coming Monday, but it's probably not worth losing your mind over. In fact, Major Nelson goes out of his way to affirm that "when [Xbox Live] service returns, you will not have any new features and you will not have the new Xbox experience update." Point being, your Zune Social, Zune.net forums, all of the Zune Marketplace and Xbox Live services will be offline for up to 24 hours (48 hours for the Zune suite) starting at 12:01 PST on September 29th, but don't expect a Zunephone to pop out of your now-forgotten HD DVD add-on when things come back on. Or you can, but we'd be prepared for unprecedented disappointment.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

Read - Xbox Live down time
Read - Zune services down time

[Darkroom @ Sep 26th 2008 11:22PM]

ghetto...

[Flashpoint @ Sep 26th 2008 11:37PM]

If I am without service for even one night of COD4 ownership, I don't know what I'll do.

[MemphisNET @ Sep 27th 2008 8:53AM]

Hopefully Messenger service will be ok.... I can't think of life without at least one of my Microsoft babies.

[Mr. B @ Sep 26th 2008 11:24PM]

24-48 hours? I think they need more staff.

[MRCUR @ Sep 26th 2008 11:25PM]

It annoys me that people don't write Xbox LIVE correctly with the caps. LIVE is for Xbox while Live is MS' online services, like Office Live and Live OneCare.

Also, the Xbox Forums and MyXbox on Xbox.com will be down during the maintenance.

[Rubicon @ Sep 26th 2008 11:35PM]

stop being such a fanboi

[EmoChicksAreHot.....Seriously @ Sep 26th 2008 11:54PM]

Dude....really?

[Brian @ Sep 27th 2008 12:27AM]

LiVe
there, now it's the best of both worlds.

[ColumnBreak @ Sep 27th 2008 12:48AM]

That is pretty fanboy-ish of you, but I do have to agree that people should respect the brand names. After all, company's spend hours and dollars to create these brand names so that people don't mix them up. Plus, making sure Microsoft product names are accurate is part of my job. :P

[bjsguess @ Sep 27th 2008 1:22AM]

Yeah, because no Apple fanbois would freak out if Engadget called the iPhone the Iphone or the i-phone or the I-Phone.

[UnixSystemsEngineer @ Sep 27th 2008 2:01PM]

bjsguess,

Likely not. Although people look stupid when they say "MAC" instead of "Mac" since the MAC acronym has a specific meaning, and everyone knows that Mac is short for Macintosh. Worrying about the capitalization on XBox LIVE is stupid because it's just arbitrary branding-related capitalization and doesn't change the meaning.

That out of the way, I'm not entirely convinced they won't be rolling out the new dashboard..they did say they'd do it in Fall, right? I'm looking forward to Netflix on the XBox :)

[atatmia @ Sep 26th 2008 11:26PM]

i got all exited when i saw the message on my xbox about this at the end it said something about "'the new xbox experience"
i been waiting for this alot! when is the update coming microsoft?????????

[THizzle7XU @ Sep 26th 2008 11:27PM]

Umm, it's been revealed already. November is the official word.

[MRCUR @ Sep 26th 2008 11:28PM]

November...be patient.

[kojo87 @ Sep 26th 2008 11:25PM]

i have my roommate's HD-DVD add-on attached to my PC. i plugged it in and my screen just kept flashing "FAIL"

[chadow @ Sep 26th 2008 11:33PM]

You must hear that yourself an awful lot as well.

[Wes @ Sep 27th 2008 9:06AM]

That's odd. It flashed 'Fail'? You know, I had the almost same thing happen to me recently when I lined up all your homework assignments from your education since birth in one big pile and flipped threw them like a stop motion animation but sometimes it was just a big F instead of fail.

[drumdbeat @ Sep 27th 2008 10:46AM]

Good effort, Wes.

[Backlin @ Sep 27th 2008 4:29PM]

Dude, play a different HD-DVD!!!

[Deeznuts420 @ Sep 29th 2008 8:32AM]

your screen might be telling YOU something dude.

[Karl @ Sep 26th 2008 11:31PM]

Combined stores? Please, please please!

[Sam Zebian @ Sep 26th 2008 11:36PM]

They're just preparing their internal networks and servers for the Zune integration with the November fall update for the Xbox. It's only been long coming and will finally be a reality. We will finally be able to download movies on 360 to your Zune directly, you will see.

[Joel @ Sep 27th 2008 12:00PM]

The XNA Community games are also coming out of beta at this same time

[Jubei @ Sep 27th 2008 12:07AM]

A quick look at Google headline news results with..... *crickets* nothing. Really, there is no reason for this announcement. Only a handful of fanatic users will be affected.

[Zeus.:God @ Sep 27th 2008 1:13AM]

More like millions of users... It's ok, Jubei- some day you'll learn how to count.

[bjsguess @ Sep 27th 2008 1:24AM]

I wouldn't take that bet.

[Michael @ Sep 27th 2008 4:33AM]

Actually, this update is really more about informing people that the new dashboard look ISN'T coming with this outage... it's not as much about the outage. (At least, that's how I see it.)

Personally, I'm really looking forward to the update for the Netflix streaming capabilities and got excited that it was coming with this maintenance. Oh well. Guess I gotta wait until November.

[riggs @ Sep 29th 2008 8:35AM]

crickets are plaguing your RSS feeds?.............



RUN!

[roach @ Sep 27th 2008 12:18AM]

Now I know how MobileMe users feel. Im a PC...Im not use to these kind of shit!

[hamza @ Sep 27th 2008 3:23AM]

Wow, people still own an xbox, I thought by now everyone would switch to PS3s.

[Kizorblade @ Sep 27th 2008 3:51AM]

Wow, idiots are still alive... I thought by now they'd all be dead.

[GON @ Sep 27th 2008 3:44AM]

Thanks for the heads up.

[Drew Green @ Sep 27th 2008 8:15AM]

Damnit! According to UPS i'm supposed to get my repaired RROD'd 360 back from MS on monday and was hoping to get some Rock Band 2 dlc. Does this mean the marketplace will be unavailable as well?

[Moorio - XBL: peacebyanymeans @ Sep 27th 2008 12:28PM]

Yes that's what it means.

BUT, while you won't be able to use the in-game Music Store, you can go to the Rock Band 2 section in Marketplace and download the songs right now, before the outage happens. That way, when you get the game on Monday and LIVE is down, you'd already downloaded some songs.

[EricC @ Sep 27th 2008 8:23AM]

"starting at 12:01 PST on September 29th"

The image you posted doesn't say PST; it says Pacific Time. 12:01 PST is 1:01 PDT, which is incorrect.

[AL @ Sep 27th 2008 8:32AM]

Any outage this long is likely to be hardware related. Sounds like a major upgrade on the back-end.

Let's hope that it prevents any outage during the holidays this year.

[Glenn @ Sep 27th 2008 9:36AM]

Microsoft has been putting in datacenters at a fantastic pace. This was going to have to be done sometime to transition the backend services the new platform. While it won't show anything now, it will allow for new features this Fall.

[drumdbeat @ Sep 27th 2008 10:48AM]

I read the message i got from Xbox LIVE on my 360, and was like, "Wow, I Can't wait!".

Then i sent it in to Engadget.

Then i read the "Inside Xbox" and found it wouldn't be the actual update....


I felt like such a douche.

[Joel @ Sep 27th 2008 11:58AM]

For some insight as to what is changing look no further than the XNA team blog pages

http://blogs.msdn.com/xna/archive/2008/09/23/xbox-live-downtime-and-you.aspx

[1234 @ Sep 27th 2008 12:09PM]

Right now, none of the zune social is syncing back to your PC showing which songs you played and how many times they were played. Making the whole "social" absolutely pointless. Hopefully this update includes fixes for that.

[WixosTrix @ Sep 28th 2008 3:24AM]

thats only an issue for some people and a lot of those people do get updates it just takes a long time to update. They said on Zune Insider that they were working on it. Apparently, due to the channels, picks, etc. they amount of data sent through the severs is substantially larger than they expected and is slowing things down. Hopefully this outage will tailor to that need of more available servers or whatever the problem is.

[zMastaa @ Sep 28th 2008 7:50AM]

Erm wtf? the zune DOES sync play count my friend....

[ALCie @ Sep 27th 2008 4:02PM]

So what could this mean for Zune Marketplace? Ive noticed that its been quite sluggish lately and Mixview isnt as smooth as it should be. It could be a performance thing.
Or maybe they are adding new content? Games have been missing and the current method of getting games is not integrated at all. Marketplace should offer a simple way to get games, hopefully it will.
Also, Marketplace hasnt been brought to Canada yet, and it was promised to come in late 2008. Would there need to be a server outage for Marketplace to come to Canada?
The only way this affects me is Podcasts, but Ill live.

[panamnyc @ Sep 27th 2008 5:45PM]

they dont need a zunephone. all they need to do if they really wanna compete is to is merge the zune UI with Windows mobile (7) the same way apple uses the same interface for both the iphone and ipod touch.

[Garst @ Sep 27th 2008 7:19PM]

Couldn't Major Nelson just ask Jeannie to fix the problem without any down time? Just a thought.

[shadowblast101 @ Sep 27th 2008 11:44PM]

just got this email: http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y253/shadowblast/xboxemail.png

email says downtime means update.

[zMastaa @ Sep 28th 2008 7:52AM]

shadowblast101 i think you should read it again, but slower