According to most reports the services went offline and all we have heard from Microsoft is that they are working on the issue that last message was posted at 12:45PM on twitter. When we tried to sign into the Zune application we had no issues, but have heard from a few people that use the Xbox that they still cannot get into their Xbox Live Accounts.
Microsoft’s Service Status Page still shows that Xbox Live and Zune are still impacted, but are not disclosing how many users are affected. We are guessing that it is a fairly large number as they would not have posted such a public message for a few users. Microsoft has not said when they expect the issue to be resolved (or given any details of what the problem is) so when things will be corrected is anyone’s guess at this point.

It does highlight concerns that some are having (us included) over the cloud based push that Microsoft is trying with Windows 8. What we really hope is that this issue is an upgrade of hardware/software to try and prevent this type of outage in the future and not something like a botched DRM patch like what affected Apple recently. If it is not, well then we wonder how efficient Microsoft’s services will be when they starting including more and more tablets and PCs into the mix using the Live backbone… or whatever they will call it when Windows 8 rolls out.

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