Xbox Live Servers Get Hammered for the Holidays

Microsoft's Xbox 360 has been concurrently selling well throughout the holiday season, selling over 2 million consoles from November 4^th to December 30^th, just nearly falling behind Nintendo's high demand but short supplied Wii, selling 2.7 million units, while Sony's PS3 sold only 1.3 million units (according to VG Chartz).

The massive boost in sales (along with the additional subscriptions to Xbox Live, which come free with a trial with most versions of the system) left servers in the dust the following days after Christmas, when people tried to sign on the most. Many people couldn't maintain a steady connection from server taking too many requests, and weren't allowed to play their favorite games online, outraging much of the video game community.

Xbox Live is an online service attached with Xbox 360 and Xbox consoles. It allows for gamers to play with their friends online, along with downloading additional content for their games or get new games through the Arcade (using a "point" based system, the Arcade's currency). This all comes with a subscription fee however, with different time packages differing in price (usually averaging a year of service for $50.)

While the interruptions in service angered many people, Microsoft tech support has received millions of phone calls (from this author included) and have been assuring customers that they've been working day and night on fixing the problem, and it certainly seems they have. Service as of a few days ago has been better than it was during the holiday rush, with Microsoft estimating to even out the remaining bugs and problems in the coming weeks.

The 360 was considered a powerhouse this year from several high budget, high profile game releases over a very short time period, with titles such as Mass Effect, Halo 3 (although released before other games, it's still selling many copies), Call Of Duty 4, Rock Band and Assassin's Creed. Most of these games have online play, with several thousands (and in the case of Call Of Duty 4, millions) of people playing at the same time during peak hours.

Microsoft assures working service very soon, so customers will simply have to wait for the intermittent problems to cease. Unfortunately there aren't many things customers can do to better their service in this case since the problem is server-side and not with the user, so it's advised not to try tampering with your connection, potentially causing more problems for a service you can't fix at the moment. If you cannot connect to Xbox Live, just try again in a few hours.