Microsoft offers free month of Xbox Live to members hit by outage

Microsoft’s recent Xbox Live outage left gamers scrambling as they lost access to their Cloud Saved Games on Friday. Joystiq reported a couple days back that the online feature for Xbox is not exactly stable at the moment and that inconsistencies are to be expected. These glitches caused a lot of problems for online streaming services on the console like Netflix, HBO Go and Hulu Plus. More importantly, however, it was the lack of access to saved games in the cloud. Members affected by this outage on Friday would receive an error, reading 0x807b0198.

Do more with Xbox Live

All these issues have now been fixed and in order to compensate for the disruption in service, Microsoft is offering an additional month of Xbox Live for free. The Cloud Saved Games feature is now back online and all issues pertaining to the outage has been resolved. Microsoft spokesperson Larry Hryb had a little message on his blog to all those affected; “We want to thank all of our Xbox LIVE members impacted by the Cloud Saved Games service issue for your patience and understanding. It took longer than we expected to get back to full performance as we needed to ensure the integrity of everyone’s game saves. 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. 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.”

Xbox Live has been a very popular online service that continues to grow year after year, with new features and services being added on a timely basis. Earlier this year, Microsoft announced about rolling out updates to add more than 40 new apps to its Xbox Live service such as MTV, The CW Network and CBC’s Hockey Night in Canada. While some of the apps will be free to use, many of them will require an additional subscription from the user, even if they have a Gold subscription to Xbox Live. It’s estimated that users in the US spend on an average, 84 hours a month on Xbox Live, which is a lot and is the reason why Microsoft is expanding the service even further.