Xbox owners who want some serious gaming done before Monday rolls in are up for a major disappoint on Sunday night when several Xbox Live services went down.
Microsoft announced on its Xbox Live status page that Social and Gaming are currently unavailable for users of the Xbox 360. The problem previously affected Xbox One owners, but it appears Microsoft has issued a fix for its flagship gaming system ahead of the Xbox 360.
"Hey Xbox members, are you having issues with 'Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare' crashing during multi-player following the latest title update? Additionally, are you having trouble sharing to Facebook?" Microsoft says on its status page. "We're working with our partner to correct these issues! Thank you for your patience. We'll update you as soon as we know more."
Gamers' friends lists are also affected, with users reporting their list of friends having dwindled to zero as of Sunday night.
A couple of apps are also not working properly. These include Slacker Radio and Xbox Fitness, which Microsoft promised to fix as soon as possible.
For those who want to know when Xbox Live and the affected apps will be fully up and running once again, Microsoft says it will notify anyone who is signed in to a Microsoft account and has provided a 10-digit U.S. phone number.
The partial outage of Xbox Live comes just days after Microsoft posted a new job listing for more engineers to keep Xbox Live up and running all the time.
"Do you believe that 'the best outage is the one that you never had'?" the listing says. "If you do and have the detailed orientation, the engineering principles and passion to make this a reality, then read on."
The listing then goes on to say that the Xbox Live Service Delivery Core Infrastructure team is looking for new members to create, manage and troubleshoot the Xbox Live infrastructure from the application layer down to the base hardware.
Gaming is not one of Microsoft's biggest revenue generators, but Xbox Live is an effective way for the company to test its own cloud technology, which Microsoft is hoping to sell big to enterprise customers via Azure and other business-centric cloud-based services. However, if the history of Xbox Live punctuated with outages, especially during major product launches, tells anything, Microsoft needs to do a lot more work to improve its cloud services.
