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Microsoft giving free month of Xbox Live Gold to those impacted by cloud saves outage


Microsoft's Xbox Live cloud saves feature recently suffered an outage that was resolved Monday.

Late last week, Microsoft suffered an outage of its Xbox Live cloud saves feature that caused users who use the feature to not be able to load their saves. Now, to apologize for the issue, Microsoft's providing those users with a free month of Xbox Live Gold.

Microsoft's Larry Hryb made the announcement today and revealed the feature is now back online. Furthermore, he provided the following message from Alex Garden, the general manager of Xbox Live:

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.

As always, I welcome your feedback. Game on!

Hryb added that users won't need to call Microsoft's support team as the company knows exactly who was affected and will automatically apply Xbox Live Gold extensions to those users' accounts.

The outage, which lasted about three days, is believed to have been caused by downtime at one of Microsoft's Windows Azure server facilities. From Friday to Sunday, the same time frame the Xbox Live cloud saves feature went offline, an Azure server cluster was offline, although the issue had no impact on server data.

Source: Major Nelson | Image via Microsoft

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