Microsoft finally came clean with the goods and admitted to what everyone already knew–Xbox Live service broke during the holidays because of a massive flood of new users and holiday gamers jumping on the grid.
Albert Penello, marketing manager at Microsoft, explained:
"We had the biggest concurrent day we’ve ever had on Live. We had more people than ever signing up on Live, it was 9 million, then 10 million, and it literally was that a lot more people were trying to get on, sign up and play than we had expected over Christmas."
During the outages, GamerNode speculated that Microsoft probably had a skeleton crew during Christmas and didn’t have enough people on board to deal with the flood of Xbox Live users. Penello confirmed our guess and said, "It’s easy when we’re all [at] the office in November, but on December 25th, it’s harder to get a hold of everybody."
He then added, "I hope people feel like [giving away a free Live Arcade game] is a fair make good for the inconvenience."
Xbox Live has been bludgeoned with criticism and outrage from its subscribers for the shoddy service. Penello responded by saying, "I’d also say in seven years, this has happened maybe zero other times, but I can’t remember a time when, other than the slow downloads we had when we launched Video Marketplace, we have had a service outage that wasn’t planned."
Regardless of whether this breakdown could have been prevented or not, we’ll never know. What we do know, however, is there are still lots of unhappy campers out in Xbox Live Land, and as Penello has said, maybe that free XBL Arcade game can sooth and calm the storm.
[via kotaku]
