Microsoft Resolves Short Xbox LIVE Outage, Blames Human Error

Microsoft has officially confirmed an issue which prevented Xbox owners from accessing Xbox LIVE on October 3, 2011. According to the Xbox LIVE team, users of Zune, as well as those running Games for Windows LIVE software on PCs, and Windows Phone were also impacted.

The Redmond company provided information to affected customers via the Status page on Xbox.com and from @XboxSupport on Twitter as the outage unfolded.

As the software giant resolves the glitch, it also provided an update offering some additional details, on top of confirming the issues that users were experiencing.

On October 3 “members were disconnected from Xbox LIVE and found themselves unable to log back in. This impacted LIVE users on Xbox 360 consoles, those running Zune & Games for Windows LIVE software on PCs, and Windows Phone,” revealed Microsoft’s Eric Neustadter.

The company moved quite fast to identify and resolve the issue, and just a few hours after the first problems were reported, the outage had already been dealt with. “This began just after 9AM Pacific and was resolved roughly two hours later,” Neustadter added.

With users being able to one again connect to Xbox LIVE without any problems, Microsoft also offered some additional details designed to shed light on just exactly what had happened.

Neustadter stressed that human error was the root cause that ended up generating the outage. He also indicated that the company has worked to prevent similar problems from occurring in the future.

“A change resulted in an interruption to normal traffic flow within our datacenters, which logged users out and prevented them from logging back in. We’re sorry for this, and we’ll be updating our processes to prevent this from happening again in the future,” Neustadter revealed.

At the time of this article there were no issues with accessing Xbox LIVE either from an Xbox 360 console or from other devices.