Xbox Live Experiencing Problems

[Dr.Finger]

As most gamers who have tried to connect to Xbox Live at some point in the last 48 hours know, the network is experiencing some intermittent, yest still significant, problems.

Major Nelson informs us (http://www.majornelson.com/archive/2007/12/29/xbox-live-status-12-29.aspx) that they know about the problem, are working on it, and that no one is going home until the situation is resolved.

It's a minor thing, but this is at least the fourth Christmas week in a row during which XBL has had significant problems. It's not a good way to make a good impression on new (or old) customers

[PatrickRes9]

Dr. Finger, thank you for the post. I'm glad someone got around to making one. From my personal experience, LIVE has been up and down (mostly down), as the post suggests, for the last two days. Its been rough for us COD4 and Live Arcade players especially. It sort of feels like my Arcade games have been held hostage. I'm on my second system and cant play them unless im on the internet. I can barely access my dashboard.

I wouldn't really call it "minor", but again thanks for the post.

[oldjadedgamer]

Everyone is getting hit, not just XBL. Even COD4 PS3 players are out in the cold.

[Vermillion]

I was having trouble even logging into Zune today. I blame sun spots.

Maybe they'll give us free days like they did last time to make up for it.

[PatrickRes9]

I was having trouble even logging into Zune today. I blame sun spots.

Maybe they'll give us free days like they did last time to make up for it.


Yeah, even Zune was having issues, I heard. It's been pretty crappy. I have company over for the holidays, and I really wanted them all to get to play 360 with me on LIVE

[Telefrog]

Yeah, even Zune was having issues, I heard. It's been pretty crappy. I have company over for the holidays, and I really wanted them all to get to play 360 with me on LIVE

I wonder if the Zune outtages have to do with the integration of the ZuneCard and the Gamertags?

[PatrickRes9]

I wonder if the Zune outtages have to do with the integration of the ZuneCard and the Gamertags?

Didn't consider that at all. Thats a distinct possibility. Guess we're all waiting on good ol' Major Nelson for some sort of "official" story.

[Draft]

Well, you get what you pay for.

Oh wait, that's right, you simps actually pay money for that shit.

[mkelehan]

If you're having dashboard hanging, press X to sign out, then go into whatever you want to play. It'll automatically sign you back in. It just doesn't want you connected while you're on the Games, Marketplace, or Xbox Live blades.

[rein]

He updates his twitter (http://twitter.com/majornelson/) account more frequently than his blog. The last twitter update:
"Trust us, we're just as pissed as you are."

[Grimmjow]

Teh internets is going down!

[Silversmith]

I guess the successful Christmas is getting to them

[Talvish]

Hey Dr.Finger, not sure what you mean by fourth week in a row? It has been this past week that has been bad. Were there issus in the previous three weeks? I only started to notice about 3 days ago.

[PatrickRes9]

Hey Dr.Finger, not sure what you mean by fourth week in a row? It has been this past week that has been bad. Were there issus in the previous three weeks? I only started to notice about 3 days ago.

Exactly. It's been the worst I've ever seen it this last weekend

[J3DI]

Maybe... Just maybe... They are updating LIVE to get ready for that long promised IPTV. Its still coming in the fall... right:rolleyes:

[PatrickRes9]

Maybe... Just maybe... They are updating LIVE to get ready for that long promised IPTV. Its still coming in the fall... right:rolleyes:

I dont think Microsoft would ever promise something cool like IPTV, and not deliver. I mean...everything they said Vista would do, it does, right? We definately didn't get a watered down version of the OS they promised.

[rpgedgar]

If Microsoft is listening right now, a free download of an HD movie would be nice, I've been itching for a good reason to try it out.

[PatrickRes9]

Latest update from Major Nelson :
"Not much new right now. We're still in the middle of the storm. You can bet we'll have some 'fun' meetings tomorrow about this."

[Vampyre]

Geez, I'm so happy I'm paying for this... and look at those Points Cards I got in my stocking... :) oh wait.. can't use them, cause live is down... silly ***

[suVa]

Hey Dr.Finger, not sure what you mean by fourth week in a row? It has been this past week that has been bad. Were there issus in the previous three weeks? I only started to notice about 3 days ago.

I'm going to guess by fourth x-mas week in a row he was referring to past x-mas's.. cause there normally is issues with Live every year right after x-mas.

Though this is the worst by far.

[TrackZero]

Maybe... Just maybe... They are updating LIVE to get ready for that long promised IPTV. Its still coming in the fall... right:rolleyes:

To my knowledge that was only ever with a partnership with AT&T or Verizon or something for their select areas with SONET. It was never promised to the masses.

[II ZoiD II]

Only 12 more months and we get to do it all over again.

[Mal.Reynolds]

You know when it comes up how many friends are online it says i have like 59 Friends online when theres only like 10-15

[Wraith]

The entire LIVE team has been working day and night to ensure that you can have a great LIVE experience. While we’re not done yet, I wanted to let you know that things are getting better each hour and that no one on the team is going anywhere until the job is done.Xbox Live team members are accepting donations in the form of Jolt, Bawls, Vault, and Mountain Dew.
Or: the award for Most Stressful Game Industry Job fueled by Mountain Dew goes to the Microsoft Xbox Live team.

[Hemalin]

Everyone is getting hit, not just XBL. Even COD4 PS3 players are out in the cold.

I've been playing TF2 just fine.

[Yeti2005]

Just logged on, played a few games online, downloaded a crappy Dark Mesiah demo without any issues. Anyone still having problems?

[DrHogie]

Yup -- still having problems. Haven't been able to log on at all during "peak" hours -- i.e. 5pm-11pm central time. Had my brother over from out of state last night (home for the holidays) and wasn't able to do a damn thing online until after midnight. Wasn't able to sign onto XBL, couldn't access the Marketplace, and my brother couldn't recover his XBL account for my 360 box. The weird thing was: My 360 was showing "Disconnected" -- yet I would get friends online/offline updates. Amazingly, after midnight . . . everything started working fine.

I'm no XBox Live engineer . . . but the whole thing reeks of "Our servers are overloaded and we need more capacity but we can't get the extra servers/refuse to buy the extra servers".

[Haemorrhage]

Man, I go on holidays for a week and come home to this. And I was looking forward to some CoD4 tonight. Ah well, maybe I can finally finish the single player in CoD4 or check out who's online on Steam.

[mikeohara]

In all seriousness, this is how many times since before Christmas that Live has been having problems?

and look, there's even a troll post!

[J3DI]

To my knowledge that was only ever with a partnership with AT&T or Verizon or something for their select areas with SONET. It was never promised to the masses.

I actually had to look up 'SONET,' it sounds pretty cool; LEDs and Fiber transmitted data. Did some more scrounging and also saw that AT&T as of earlier this year had 11 IPTV areas up and running. The rest of the areas are slow to start as Microsoft is having issues with the tech - so says AT&T.

unrelated -
Dude I drove from Toronto two weeks back... I saw the devil in a snow plow! That 401 is crazy in the winter... don't know how you do it. But I feel in love when I saw that the York-whatever mall had a late night sushi sale :)

Regular scheduled post -
So, there is also a Microsoft and AT&T keynote about IPTV next week at CES. Hopefully they will announce when it will be making a full launch... and if we're lucky they'll say that the outages on LIVE was a result of that intergration.:D

Sad this all had to happen when I finally get a new headset for LIVE :(

[Inspector Fowler]

Seemed like it was much better for me when I finished playing CoD4 about 40 minutes ago.

[Rune_74]

Can you imagine all the new 360's trying to setup etc.....man it must be crazy....wonder what the sales were like this year for the 360...

[Wolvie]

Wonder if this explains why Halo 3 has been a laggy cluster-fuck for the last couple of days.

[Talvish]

I don't believe this is entirely related to load based on new users. I'm quite familiar with running large scale online services, and the addition of another 25% isn't much of an issue. And yes sometimes you will get wierd issues with hardware (like a particular router flapping in a bizarre fashion above a particular load), those things are generally easy to track down and fix in a short period of time.

Given how long and the seemingly disparate kind of issues that are showing up, if I were to hazard a guess, it would be something new was happening on the backend. For example, in large scale systems your test environments do not allow you to simulate the production service (since it is too expensive to mimic the environment completely). So instead you upgrade a few servers and funnel some of the traffic through it. Typically if that goes bad, you turn them off and rollback to a previous version.

But if that partial upgrade did something unexpected, then, well, you start getting issues all over the map.

Perhaps it is something new (CES 2008 related maybe?), perhaps it was a backend patch gone awry, but I would hazard a guess that the issue wasn't entirely load.

[ZeroType]

Hey Dr.Finger, not sure what you mean by fourth week in a row? It has been this past week that has been bad. Were there issus in the previous three weeks? I only started to notice about 3 days ago.

He meant that over the last four years, the week of Christmas has historically been trouble for Microsoft, Live, and it's user base.

[Xijar]

I will agree with the people suggesting that we receive lots of free stuff as compensation. Or maybe they could even prepare adequately for next holiday season to prevent this from happening.

[Morratut]

For me this is the first time it's happened. I amazed that MS didn't plan for the surge in usage over xmas.

Oh well I can play Ace Combat 6 and maybe start BioShock.

Feels weird though not having the option to play with my online peeps.

[Gott]

Live had been fine for me until yesterday...

A few days of downtime a year isn't anything to get your panties in a bunch about ladies.

[spdiscus]

Damn. I flashed the firmware on my wireless router because I thought it was my setup. Ended up spending 20 minutes troubleshooting newly-broken security just to realize D-Link biffed the Firefox support with v3.23.

[Dr.Finger]

Hey Dr.Finger, not sure what you mean by fourth week in a row? It has been this past week that has been bad. Were there issus in the previous three weeks? I only started to notice about 3 days ago.What the other guys said. For the last few Christmases XBL has been having problems, starting (at least) with the year before the 360 launched.

[rainbowblack]

no problems with my Zune as far as sign-in's go

But when i sign in to XBL thats where I've hit a problem. It signs me into XBL. but the blades wont load. If I start a game/listen to music/media center extender and go back to dashboard everything is fine. But i would still like my blades to load without having to perform a separate action to fix it.

I'm not sure if it's a LIVE problem or my consoles. But it started the day after X-mas, coincidence?

[Telefrog]

How do you turn off Friends notifications? I'm trying to play Mass Effect and the constant pop-ups are are killing me during the conversation sequences. The "[Blank] is now online" notice comes up right in the middle of the menu!

[Klunka]

How do you turn off Friends notifications? I'm trying to play Mass Effect and the constant pop-ups are are killing me during the conversation sequences. The "[Blank] is now online" notice comes up right in the middle of the menu!

Hit your home button -> personal settings -> notifications

[miah]

Geh, ya I signed on last night, and then was promptly disconnected. I was able to play my games fine, but no XBL love :(

[Telefrog]

Hit your home button -> personal settings -> notifications

Thanks! That crap was driving me nuts.

[Zanzibar]

It's not a good way to make a good impression on new (or old) customers

Meh. Try the blinking RROD on the display X360 at my local Gamestop.

[SilentScreams]

Just tried to play CoD 4 in a party with two friends.
We never actually managed to get in a game together. It kept on putting two of us in, and leaving one out. I don't know if this is related to the XBL problems, but it was really annoying.
Also, why is there no party chat option on CoD 4? It would be really useful.

Aside from that, on the games I did get in, I saw some of the worst lag ever. It didn't look like lag until the Kill-cam showed what really happened and it looked nothing like what I thought was happening at the time.
For example I ran through a door and emptied almost a full M4 clip into a guy, then he shot me and I died. I thought it was a bit wierd, but I thought maybe he got lucky. But on the Kill-cam, I just ran through the door, pretty much ran straight into him and he shot me. I didn't even fire a shot on the Kill-cam.

[Cedrock]

xmas=xbox live broken for over a week, lets hope by this weekend it gets better.

[ÜberJumper]

I wonder if it's database problems or bandwidth problems. I suspect it's database performance issues and they need to tune some indexes.

[Tennistoad]

This Just in from Xbox support. "The problem we have encountered was due to a majority of our servers producing the 3 rings of death". Although it was stated by a higher up ms source as "just a few servers and not indicative of any real manufacturing problem"

[card930]

And I thought it was just me. Thank God. My rabbit ate my network cable, and i made a new one, and I was having all these problems, I thought it was the cable. Glad it's not.

[Pitpig]

I understand when there are problems. I'd just like to see some more communication. We're doing this... we're trying that... kind of stuff. Oh yeah, and free stuff.

COD4 seems better, but not great.

[wyeast]

Gee. Any guesses how the servers are acting today? :rolleyes:

Arrrgggggh :mad:

[rein]

Hey Microsoft, stop screwing around and fix the frigging servers NOW!

What are we on, three or four days now?

[Johan]

Occasional service hiccups are understandable, as are periodic, infrequent, scheduled maintenance interruptions.

This, however, has been flat-out ridiculous. My "Gold" membership has basically been a "Silver" membership for days.

Great job, MS...your service has become a real "load" this week.

[rein]

Occasional service hiccups are understandable, as are periodic, infrequent, scheduled maintenance interruptions.

This, however, has been flat-out ridiculous. My "Gold" membership has basically been a "Silver" membership for days.

Great job, MS...your service has become a real "load" this week.
I was going to stop using bad words in 2008. I've already blown that one. Oh well... ....there is always 2009. :)

[MrWonderstuff]

It's down...again.

[wyeast]

Here's to stirring the pot -

It almost feels like they've made this conscious decision not to do anything about it. Yeah, the servers'll overload during prime time, we'll tell them we're working on it, and it'll magically "fix" itself late at night when the load is down. We just ride it out until kids are back into school and nobody'll be the wiser...

:rolleyes:

Almost :p

The above is pure speculation and hopefully completely unfounded. I'm just venting because I've burned a couple of vacation days intending to catch up with my friends on Live! and I've got nada. Guess I'll go watch reruns on TV instead. :(

[Shifter]

Wow I'm glad to hear people talking about this. My dashboard has been hanging for about 3 weeks now and I haven't been able to get on Live. I thought it was something on my side, but everything else connected to my network seems to be running just fine. So you're saying that I should try logging in during non-peak hours?

[Gorvi]

It seems like there are still issues even now. I went on to grab the KUF demo this morning, but LIVE acts like it's not there. The listing is, but it gives an error when you go to it.

[LionEyez]

It seems like there are still issues even now. I went on to grab the KUF demo this morning, but LIVE acts like it's not there. The listing is, but it gives an error when you go to it.

Yeah, I keep getting the same thing with various other demos. Glad it's not just another silver vs gold member thing.

[Church42]

Same here Gorvi...trying to grab things and they're not there...I've always had this problem with movies and such but never with game content/videos/demos/etc

[phantomhitman]

live has not been working smoothly since the halo 3 launch. Minor issues here and there have become a major pain in my ass. I gave up and have been playing tf 2 on the pc for 2 weeks now, fuck live.

[Shifter]

I keep trying to log into marketplace but don't get anything but that circle circling thing. Even at odd non-peak hours. It all happened with the latest update. It seems to locate my network just fine and passes all the tests, but then doesn't actually show marketplace or anything but the Media page.

Is this the same problem everyone is having?

[Gorvi]

I was able to get in this morning and download the KUF demo as well as the trial version for Metal Slug 3. For some reason, though, it stopped downloading when I loaded up Lost Planet, and didn't resume until I was done and went back to the dashboard.

[silv]

Aside from slowness, I had no problems messing around with Live! last night.

[MrWonderstuff]

I think its an issue with the EU and US people being on at the same time. During the day, here in London, its pretty ok. Hit 8pm and that's when it goes down and starts acting up.

[menage]

My box acted really weird when connected to Live yesterday. Unplugged it, worked fine. MS really needs to sort this shit out.

[Johan]

MS really needs to sort this shit out.

It will sort itself out, with people quitting Live Gold, and others having their 360s explode/burn-out.

http://www.emoticons4u.com/evil/teu42.gif

[Rune_74]

Hey look johan had his troll icon out:)

[jpc_theoneandonly]

Cyber terrorism. See, they know just where to hit us.