Microsoft makes up for lagging XBL service over Christmas

Supporting Evidence

I was frustrated with lagging Xbox Live (XBL) service over the holidays. Apparently, I wasn't the only one. Due to a high volume of new XBL accounts being created from all those lucky enough to get an Xbox 360 for Christmas rather than a PS3, the XBL servers were slammed. Microsoft recognized this and went about fixing the technical problems on their end. For us consumers, we saw slowed game play, connectivity, and some outages. In response to this, Microsoft is giving every XBL account holder a free arcade game download (the game announced is Undertow). These downloads usually cost around five or six dollars. Thank you Microsoft for recognizing a problem with your service, fixing it, and making it up to the users.

Posted below is a letter from Marc Whitten, General Manager of Xbox Live, about Xbox LIVE this past holiday season and an update about the free download.

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 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

Updated January 18, 2008

We’re pleased to announce that from 2:00 a.m. PST Wednesday, January 23, 2008 through 11:59 p.m. PST, Sunday, January 27, 2008 you can download the full version of the recent Xbox LIVE Arcade game, Undertow free of charge.

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