Thousands of Xbox 360 gamers found intermittent and sketchy connections to Xbox Live during the 2007 holiday, leaving many gamers confused, frustrated and downright mad. Tonight, Microsoft has finally issued a formal response that recognizes the problem and poses a solution: a free Xbox Live Arcade game for all Xbox Live members.
The open letter, which addresses the Xbox Live outages pretty directly, comes from Marc Whitten, Xbox LIVE General Manager, and will be posted on Xbox.com in the coming hours. Below is the full text of Whitten’s letter:
Dear Xbox LIVE Members:
During this past holiday season you helped us break a number of Xbox LIVE records. This included our largest sign-up of new members to Xbox LIVE in our 5 year history and just yesterday you broke the record for the single biggest day of concurrent members ever on the service.
As a result of this massive increase in usage we know that some of you experienced intermittent Xbox LIVE issues over the holiday break. While the service was not completely offline at any given time, we are disappointed in our performance. I would like to take this moment to thank you each and every one of you for your patience and understanding as our team has worked around the clock to return the service to a stable state.
At the same time we would like to offer a token of our appreciation to all of you in celebration of record success for the service. And as a thank you for your loyalty during this holiday period, we will be offering all of our Xbox LIVE members around the world access to a full Xbox LIVE Arcade game that will be available to download free of charge. In the coming weeks we will be sharing the specific details of this offer with you.
Thank you again for helping make Xbox LIVE everything that it is today!
Sincerely,
Marc Whitten
General Manager, Xbox LIVE