After a few months of decently stable service, yesterday saw Xbox Live go down for several hours. This prompted a fairly harsh response from the community, who have become fed up with these types of service outages over the past couple of years (from both PSN and Xbox Live). Xbox Head Phil Spencer was on Twitter at the time of the outage, responding to fans and press, with some of his comments being pretty interesting.
One issue was that Spencer tweeted out a link to a story on Minecraft: Story Mode, which will be coming to Xbox 360 and Xbox One on October 13th. A fan pointed out that promoting games for your system while its main online component is down is a “bad choice”, to which Spencer responded “fair feedback”.
In a more general discussion about the outage, Spencer assured fans that they knew what was causing the issue and would have it fixed soon. A fan assured that they trusted Spencer, who responded that “We have to earn the trust, each day, and I know service disruptions hurts that trust.”
Going a bit deeper into the problems that can be caused by Xbox Live outages, a reported for The Verge, Tom Warren brought up how wide spread a simple outage can be. Due tot he way Xbox Live works, if the system is down, multiple services, such as YouTube, Netflix, and more are also down, essentially rendering the entire console “useless”. Spencer agreed, saying “I think you are right. The dependencies between the services needs to be minimized.”
We’ve seen work done on this in the past. Xbox Live Gold used to be required to use streaming video services, such as Netflix. These requirements were dropped, so perhaps the requirement to login can be dropped as well, allowing you to get into other apps without being logged into Xbox Live itself.
Published: Oct 2, 2015 08:11 am