As JediXAngel pointed out in the forums, Microsoft is planning on taking down the Xbox Live service for the entire day on Tuesday October 17th. The downtime will begin at 12 midnight Pacific time on October 17th and last up to 24 hours. That"s right, both the Xbox Live service and Xbox.com website will be offline for around 24 hours. They are adding some "cool stuff" apparently to Live (and presumably Xbox.com as well) but they do not go into detail as to what the "cool stuff" might be. My guess is some sort of integration with the newly launched Xbox Live Pipeline which launched sometime on Friday I believe. Then again, maybe not. There will not be a dashboard update.
As for Xbox Live Pipeline, it is a web based Live Marketplace that PC users can browse and Xbox Live users can drool over for it is easy to browse and navigate. I"m told it is not the easiest thing in the world to do on Live, browse content that is. I don"t own an Xbox 360 so I can"t say for sure. But the Pipeline website is very nicely done, but you cannot buy or download anything through it yet. My guess again, is that when Live Anywhere launches for the PC, and connects PC users to Console users, we"ll have more "cool stuff" on Pipeline there. Then again, maybe not.
Either way, before I go off on a tangent here - Xbox Live and Xbox.com will both be down all day on Tuesday October 17th, more than likely until sometime on Wednesday the 18th. So be prepared folks, no multiplayer gaming, no chatting with your friends, no Live downloads, nothing, nada, zip.