Xbox LIVE Gets a Case of Weekend Hiccups

Ah yes. The weekend. That special time away from the daily grind of the work week where you can get away from the ol’ 9 to 5 job and hang out online with friends for a good game of Gears of War 2. At least that’s the way it should have been for Xbox 360 owners this weekend. Unfortunately, the service had other ideas.

Starting late Thursday night and lasting through last night, the Xbox LIVE service started suffering from sporadic shutdowns, disconnecting thousands of gamers at random intervals. And while the Microsoft engineers were hard at work to get everything up and running again, every time things seemed fixed, the disconnects started back up again.

According to Larry “Major Nelson” Hryb, via his official blog, “In the past few hours, the Xbox Operations Center noticed that a large number of members were disconnected from Xbox LIVE, some more than once. Our Engineering teams are actively working to determine the root cause of this issue and to prevent it from happening again. If you are disconnected, you should be able to reconnect after a few minutes. Thanks for your patience as we work quickly to solve the issue.”

For those worried that the weekend issues will interfere with the Wednesday launch of the New Xbox Experience, don’t worry just yet. The issues from the weekend appear to be resolved now. Plus, Microsoft took LIVE down for about forty five minutes in the wee hours of the morning today for maintenance to prepare for the NXE launch.