May 7, 2011 07:21 GMT  ·  By

This week, two service outages hit Windows Phone users two days in a row, on Thursday and Friday. The first of them was related to the Windows Phone Marketplace service

, while the second involved the Xbox LIVE services.

For several hours on Friday, Windows Phone users were unable to access Xbox LIVE features from their devices, but the service has already been restored, it seems.

The same happened the day before, when users were unable to access the Windows Phone Marketplace from their devices for about seven hours or so.

The Marketplace outage was caused by a scheduled maintenance for Microsoft's infrastructure, the software giant confirmed as soon as the service was restored.

No specific info on what caused the Xbox LIVE outage has been provided so far.

However, Microsoft did acknowledge the issue well before the problem was solved, and even delivered an official statement on the matter, through the Xbox LIVE status web page:

Users may experience difficulties with the following services:

Users will experience issues attempting to use LIVE services that use Token services including but not limited to connecting to Facebook\Twitter on the Xbox 360 Console, signing into Xbox LIVE using the Windows Mobile 7 phone, and editing avatars or viewing achievements on Xbox.com.

We are aware of the problem and are working to resolve the issue. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and thank you for your patience At the moment, most users should see the service restored on their Windows Phone 7 devices. Even so, it seems that there still are some issues with Xbox LIVE, according to the aforementioned support page:

Users may receive potential phishing attempts via title specific messaging while playing Modern Warfare 2.

As stated above, Microsoft managed to restore part of the service, and is also expected to provide an official statement on what caused the outage in the first place. Keep an eye on this space for updates on this.