Microsoft Offers Free Month of Xbox Live After Cloud Outage

Microsoft is providing Xbox Live Gold members with a one-month membership extension after a weekend outage blocked access to the service's Cloud Saved Games feature.

Cloud Saved Games allows Xbox Live Gold members to store saved games in the cloud on Xbox Live servers so they can continue a game on a different console. Over the weekend, however, it went offline, making saved games inaccessible.

The problem was resolved shortly before 3 a.m. Eastern time Monday morning. But Alex Garden, general manager of Xbox Live, said in a statement that "it took longer than we expected to get back to full performance as we needed to ensure the integrity of everyone's game saves," prompting the gaming credit.

"Whether you couldn't access your game saves for a couple of hours or a couple of days, we sincerely apologize for the delay and inconvenience," he continued. "We will be automatically applying a one-month extension to the Xbox Live Gold memberships of everyone who was impacted. We can assure you we'll also be doing a thorough post mortem to help prevent this from happening again."

Members do not need to contact Microsoft to take advantage of the free month of gameplay; it will be applied to users' accounts automatically.

Back in July, Xbox Live members ran into some sign-in problems when accessing Xbox Live from the console and the Web.

:story: PC Magazine