Our Bad! Microsoft to Compensate for Xbox Live Holiday Problems

January 3, 2008

Xbox Live users will be compensated for problems experienced with the online service during the holiday season, website Gamespot.com reports.

During late Dec. 2007, instead of enjoying hours of holiday video game goodness and online trash-talking, Xbox Live users suffered frequent and persistent problems, such as difficulties signing on to the service, account recovery problems and inability to participate in multiplayer games—the main perk of the service’s Gold membership.

Now Microsoft has said it has been working to fix the difficulties and will compensate its Xbox Live Gold members for the problems.

Xbox Live director of programming Larry Hryb wrote in his blog on Dec. 29 that the “record numbers of new members signing up for Xbox Live and record numbers of players online” contributed to the live service’s difficulties.

"While the service was never completely offline, problems like this are not acceptable," Hryb continued. “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.”

While service has been improving, it is reportedly still not without issues.

Website thebitbag.com spoke with a Microsoft representative who said the company “will definitely be doing something for our Gold members that weren’t able to get online over the last week.” What form that compensation will take is unknown at this time and an official statement has yet to be made.