It’s not unheard of for servers to go down although, as players, disruptions seem to happen all too often. Microsoft’s Xbox Live network had several issues this week, causing service interruption issues across their systems.
Xbox boss Phil Spencer tweeted in response to some people, where he commented on the trust and confidence that is earned by consistent user experience.
He tweeted, ‘We have to earn the trust, each day, and I know service disruptions hurts that trust.’
Following an apology for the issues, he also acknowledged the problem with the dependency that Xbox Live working has on the consoles themselves.
Tom Warren pointed out in a tweet to Spencer that when Xbox Live goes down, you can’t open any apps on the console; effectively making the console useless until the network is back up.
Spencer responded: ‘I think you’re right. The dependencies between the services needs to be minimized.’
Service disruptions are an unfortunate inevitability of an online network, but arguably more needs to be done to minimize the impact it has on the function of the console. Xbox Live isn’t alone in its problems, Sony’s PlayStation Network has had plenty of outages in the past.
The concern comes most predominantly when there are direct attacks on the network – such as the ones on Christmas day last year. In a world that is relying more and more on online services, should more be done to help protect services from future threats? Yes, but it’s a question of how and who will be funding it.
Spencer has said that Microsoft are working along with Sony and Nintendo to look into how to stop attacks on networks.