Xbox Live Goes Down, Sony Fanboys Laugh

If you've tried to play games on Xbox Live last night, know that you are not the only one. All of us encountered issues when trying to set up multiplayer matches, including Kotaku. Apparently, almost all the other functions of Xbox Live, such as voice chat and Marketplace, were up and running.

This situation lasted for a few hours, and in that time, Xbox Live's Major Nelson received countless complaints. Finally, they updated their blog with this message: "the operations team is aware of the issues and are working on it". I bet Sony fanboys were laughing their heads off, but this is the first time Xbox Live "goes down" in about 4 years.

This multiplayer gaming and content delivery system created by Microsoft has been up and running from November 2002. Currently, Xbox Live is available in 34 countries and territories around the globe, and two more (Brazil and Hungary) will join the Xbox Live family in the first quarter of 2007.

The flagship title for this service was Unreal Championship as this game has been used to show off the service at 2002's E3 convention. When it first came out, Xbox Live was revolutionary in many aspects, it featured a unified gaming Friends List, as well as a single identity across all titles, regardless of the publisher, and voice chat-a feature that was just taking off on PCs.

Xbox Live hit its first milestone in July 2004, when it registered one million subscribers, and as Halo 2 was released later the same year, the number of Xbox Live subscribers doubled in the following 12 months.