Microsoft Giving One Free Month of Xbox LIVE Gold to Members Affected by Cloud Outage
The Cloud Saved Games feature of Xbox LIVE went down on December 29th, which infuriated users, particularly those who were counting on some day-long gaming to pass the time during holiday family visits. Microsoft engineers scrambled to fix the problem, although the outage lasted until early this morning.
“It took longer than we expected to get back to full performance as we needed to ensure the integrity of everyone’s game saves”, said Xbox LIVE General Manager Alex Garden in a blog post. “Whether you couldn’t access your game saves for a couple of hours or a couple of days, we sincerely apologize for the delay and inconvenience.” Garden also pledged to perform a full post-mortem to ensure that the problem will never occur again.
To compensate users for their troubles and aggravation, Microsoft is offering users a one-month free extension to their Xbox LIVE Gold memberships. What’s more, users don’t have to do anything to get it; Microsoft says that it knows who was affected and will automatically credit those people with a free month of service.
It’s never acceptable to see this sort of downtime from a cloud service, but at least Microsoft is acknowledging that it was a big deal and is willing to throw users a bone by shelling out a little cash as atonement.
“It took longer than we expected to get back to full performance as we needed to ensure the integrity of everyone’s game saves”, said Xbox LIVE General Manager Alex Garden in a blog post. “Whether you couldn’t access your game saves for a couple of hours or a couple of days, we sincerely apologize for the delay and inconvenience.” Garden also pledged to perform a full post-mortem to ensure that the problem will never occur again.
To compensate users for their troubles and aggravation, Microsoft is offering users a one-month free extension to their Xbox LIVE Gold memberships. What’s more, users don’t have to do anything to get it; Microsoft says that it knows who was affected and will automatically credit those people with a free month of service.
It’s never acceptable to see this sort of downtime from a cloud service, but at least Microsoft is acknowledging that it was a big deal and is willing to throw users a bone by shelling out a little cash as atonement.
