Thousands of users of Xbox LIVE - an online multiplayer gaming & digital media delivery service operated by Microsoft Corp. - experienced problems in accessing the service when it went down and out yesterday in the morning.
The Redmond firm acknowledged the issue, saying that it was aware of the problem and was working to bring the service back online at the earliest. The company admitted that users experienced problems when signing into Xbox LIVE from their Xbox 360 consoles or Xbox. com.
The company said in a tweet, "We are aware of the issues some users are having with Xbox LIVE and are actively investigating. Thanks for your patience."
But, the log-in issue did not affect all users of the Xbox LIVE service. One user of the service tweeted that he could not access his Xbox LIVE account but his brother, who was in the same house, was able to access his account.
All in all, the service remained down for around five hours. At around 1:30 p. m. PT, a member of the Xbox Support crew used Tweeter to announce that the service should be back up and running.
The Xbox LIVE service, which was first launched for Xbox system in November 2002, is available both as a free and subscription service, which are called Xbox LIVE Free and Xbox LIVE Gold, respectively.