Xbox 360 Fanboy

Next Monday, for roughly four hours, Xbox Live will be ::gulp:: down. Yes sir, no Xbox Live for at least four hours on Monday. Messages from Microsoft's "Xbox Live" gamertag were sent out to all Live members notifying them that of the downtime, stating that the powers that be need to "upgrade the service". Below is the exact message that was sent out;

"Xbox LIVE will be unavailable for approximate 4 hours on September 10th 2007 to upgrade the service starting: 02:01 PDT, 09:01 GMT and 18:01 GMT+9. See xbox.com for more information"

We advise preparing some sort of replacement activity now, because when Monday rolls around and you find your Xbox Live down you may be left twiddling your thumbs. And know that thumb twiddling gets boring real quick ... you've been warned.

[Thanks, xenocidic]

Giving plenty of advanced notice, Major Nelson wanted to let everyone know that there is scheduled Xbox Live maintenance coming next week. On Tuesday, March 27th from 3:00AM EST to 5:00PM EST (that's 14 hours) Xbox Live, Xbox.com, and the Xbox Forums will be down and unavailable. Major is also making it clear that this is only internal maintenance and no new dashboard update will be released during this time. Though, we can expect a new dash update later this Spring. Come next Tuesday you'll have plenty of time to clean your room, wax your car, stare at the ceiling or complete a few tasks that Xbox.com recommends. We're scared ... hold us.

It looks like Xbox Live is down ... and no explanation has hit our mailbox yet. Most people can sign into Xbox Live, but are unable to play any online games. As soon as we hear why Live went down or when it'll be back up we'll pass along the news. Hopefully it won't be too long as we've yet to see a long term outage, but prepare for the worse. Until then you can always play some Geometry Wars.

Update 3: It looks like Live is up (as of 1:55AM EST) and running ... or so for our little test. We were able to host and join a ranked game of Gears of War successfully. We haven't received official confirmation that it's up and running, but it looks to be fixed.

Update 2: For overnight coverage and status updates on the Live outage please visit Major Nelson. On the left side of his blog, below his gamercard, he's keeping a log of information he has received about our little Live crisis. You can do it Xbox Live techs, we have faith!

Update 1: According to Xbox.com, the matchmaking aspect of Live is down. If you're experiencing issues with certain game's offline features (Gears of War), simply disconnect your Xbox 360 from the internet. Pull the plug or rip off the wireless adapter, then you'll at least be able to play campaign. Stay tuned for more updates as they filter in.