Okay, hackers with Cheez Whiz in their veins apparently aren't behind the Xbox Live outages. We are. Record signups and numbers of people are online, so "as a result of this massive increase in usage," the service got all wonky, sez Live's General Manager Marc Whitten. But they're super sorry, and to make up for it they're "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."
Specific details on the deal are coming in a few weeks, though fingers crossed we'll have some choice in the game that'll occupy space on our hard drives, 'cause a lot of the games are crap I'd never play, and getting one of those would weirdly annoy me more than just receiving a nicely worded apology. Which, coincidentally, is reproduced below. [Major Nelson]
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.
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
Gamertag: Notwen