XBOX LIVE STILL RECOVERING, RUMORS OF COMPENSATION SURFACE

As many of you have no doubt noticed, Xbox Live has been a bit wonky since just after Christmas. Numerous reports of issues with signing in, buying marketplace content, accessing downloaded content and matchmaking problems in both Halo 3 and Call of Duty 4 have been flooding in since just after the start of the holidays.

Rest assured, the folks at Microsoft are well aware of the situation and, according to Xbox Live Director of Programming Larry "Major Nelson" Hyrb, have been working around the clock to get the problems resolved. While most of the service is back up and running, some users may still be experiencing issues – and unfortunately, there is still no ETA on a full fix.

"You may have noticed that the LIVE service has been having a few issues over the past few days. This includes things like signing in, matchmaking and account recovery. Not everyone has had problems, but I know some of you have and I wanted to give you and update. While the service was never completely offline, problems like this are not acceptable. 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. Thanks for your patience.

Edit: As people have noticed, we have made good progress. We have a bit more work to do, but we’re doing much better now. I know some of you still may be having issues, and we’re working on those. Oh, and Happy New Year to those that are celebrating." – Larry "Major Nelson" Hyrb

Before anyone runs off to get the torches, according to a gaming blog called The Bitbag (found by way of Kotaku), an unnamed source at Microsoft confirmed that the company does plan on compensating Xbox Live Gold members for the outage, though no exact details on what that would entail were given.

"I got some info from my Microsoft contact after questioning whether or not Gold Members will get thrown a bone for all the downtime they had to sit through. While nothing has been officially announced, they have stated, “…we will definitely be doing something for our Gold members that weren’t able to get online over the last week.”" - Torrence Davis, The Bitbag

While it's just an unconfirmed rumor at this point, I certainly wouldn't be surprised to see at least a few days added onto everyone's expiry dates or the like.

• Xbox LIVE Status (Updated) – Major Nelson
• Microsoft Taking Care Of It's Gold Members After Last Weeks Live Outage – The Bitbag
• Microsoft to Compensate Customers For LIVE Downtime? – Kotaku