Earlier this morning, at around 9am Pacific, Xbox Live went down for a little while. What’s interesting is not the downtime itself (it was brief), but the cause: human error.
A Microsoft statement issued later in the day reads:
The root cause of this outage was human error. A change resulted in an interruption to normal traffic flow within our datacenters, which logged users out and prevented them from logging back in. We’re sorry for this, and we’ll be updating our processes to prevent this from happening again in the future.
Not being privy to the inner machinations of these services, I find it fascinating there are humans involved at any point at all. Though I guess there should be, somewhere. We don’t want Xbox Live becoming self aware. It might increase our Gold subscriptions to cover the cost of its upcoming war against humanity.