What do Xbox Live problems say about Microsoft's back-end infrastructure?

Mary Jo Foley of ZDnet.com writes, "Whether you think the recently proposed class action lawsuit over Xbox Live service holiday outages is crazy or justified, there are undeniable problems with Microsoft's back-end Live infrastructure that Microsoft needs to address."

[Lord Anubis]

when you are paying for a service it becomes a problem. A single game is not going to be sufficient perhaps a month free/extra to compensate for all those days when people couldn't play.

[TOM]

Does your cell phone company pay you for droped calls and down time? No

Does your cable company? No

How bout your ISP? No

How bout the phone company? No

A free game to say thank you means a lot to me.DOesnt matter the game,its the thought.Same for EA,when rock band burned me I didnt get pissed in any way.Why,because they work fast at fixing it.

[Lord Anubis]

Cellphone company I haven't had much problems, I'm in Silicon Valley so the only problem I had was honoring my contract which Sprint didn't want to do but I got out free of charge.

Cable company, yes I've gotten months free.

and since my ISP is controlled by Comcast my cable company I've gotten months free when they were moving to Fiber optics.
Even in the 56k era AOL would give a month free when you called them several times in a months and 3 free months when you wanted to cancel your subscription.

Phone company, I don't have one but i were paying for a service they are expected to compensate for their shortcomings.

Microsoft needs to give months free as they should.

[WilliamRLBaker]

something like 1-2 million people signed up within what 3 weeks? no one can predict that and they we're caught unprepared last i checked other companies we're caught unprepared too when alot of people logged onto play one game.

[hfaze]

Let's see... Microsoft knew that they had shipped enough 360's to have a holiday blitz like this, and they're still caught with their pants down when all of the traffic hits...

General rule of thumb... You ship that many units into the retail chains, you plan for every single one of them hitting the network and prepare accordingly...

Or it could just be yet another example of Microsoft software not scaling up very well... ;-)

[jack who]

ywan

[power of Green]

ZzZzZzZzZz...(chirp chirp chirp).

[Sayai jin]

Hmmm. Problems. Let's see I have had XBL for more than 5 years and besides the little bit of down time I had for the holidays (4 hourse for me) Xbox Live has added hundreds of continued excitement and fun for me and my family. Obviously, there have been people that has had some down time. This is unfortunate. You know the cable company does not give you any added bonus when the cable goes out. Anyways, MS put out some top hits this year, especially Halo 3 (well as far as nline gaming). I think they ever estimated that this many people would buy a 360 and sign for XBL. MS stated in a note that they met their XBL fiscal goal 6 months early. There were 7 million plus people just playing Halo 3 on XBL the other night. It would have been nice if they anticipated this and made sure there servers and infrastructure was ready for this, but they did not. I think something simliar happend when Gears of War was released. I think the game increased XBL account by 40% and they had some XBL issues for a couple of days.

XBL is a very strong online service, argubaly the best, but MS needs to fix any problems with there online service. Once they fix it they should make sure it does not happen again, but they also need to take the surge of accounts as a compliment...

[Bill Gates]

It says that it SUCKS!!!!.....AHAHAHHAAHHAHHA

Sony's is FREE, hastle FREE, headache FREE, wallet FREE, and much MUCH BETTER......AAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAH A

[Bladestar]

It shows they need to upgrade their network take under concideration future growth.... it seems as the xbox 360 is doing better than they expected... well.. that everyone expected... even Sony fanboys... by now the xbox 360 was suppost to be obsolete and the PS3 on it's 40 million installbase... but it seems as the xbox 360 is doing well... xbox live 6 months ahead of what they though it would be... that's a lot of servers and network equipment for those that actually know... ask sony if you want... they don't even have many of the features common on xbox live for a reason... they don't have the network to support it. I'm sure they will upgrade xbox live accordingly...
One can tell that this is the problem since the problems gets worst over the weekends and peek hours...

[Clinton514]

Stop pretending to know what you're talking about.

[Nevers]

people pretending to know what they are talking about.

[JosefTor]

Yes... cell phone companies and cable companies all do pay money compensation for missed or dropped calls and such. I receive free premium channels for life on Cox because of a month of shoddy service. I also receive money back each month from sprint for dropped calls. Practically any service company will provide refunds. A cheap game I will never play is not enough. Then again... the refund amount would be REALLY small and probably less then the cost of an arcade game anyway. I care about cash more then a game though.

I would call myself a pretty big Microsoft/Xbox fan but man do they need to fix their quality assurance. I am qualified quality assurance myself and don't understand how they can operate in this way.

[jack who]

bingo!!

[AzaziL]

Remember when downloadable videos first came out and the downloads were so slow it was pointless to even bother. Then the last spike that came over the holidays when a lot of new people came onto live at once. With IPTV around the corner, we all already know what's going to happen then. Simply put, M$ continuously overestimate live and end up paying the price each time. Maybe they can learn their lesson and just make a service that won't face any troubles when too many people are using it.

[Oilers Fan]

Lol the metal gear thread about framerates does not even have 3 xbox fanboys that posted, yet this article has wayyyy more, so whos fanboys are worse?