Adam Creighton, Computer and Video Gaming: Microsoft and Xbox Live upgrades ...

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Adam Creighton, Computer and Video Gaming (Subscribe)

Tuesday, March 27, 2007

Microsoft and Xbox Live upgrades ...

I'm probably going to get in trouble for this, but man, I'm irritated by Microsoft outages for Xbox Live updates.

Why? Is it because they're multi-hour affairs making the service unavailable to users for ridiculous time periods?

Sure, I'm a bit irritated on this front -- look, the current outage is a 14 planned hours.

But I'm more irritated that they have a planned 14-hour outage -- and they can't accomplish their maintenance inside that time frame (they're currently an hour late, with "no ETA").

For the last 2 (and maybe all 3) of the last 3 scheduled downtimes, operations folks have slipped significantly outside of the scheduled downtime window.

I'm not talking from a naive perspective -- I manage large-scale, multinational, enterprise systems and services. And I don't do multi-hour outages for maintenance activities. I don't do more than a handful of hours even when I'm rolling systems from one infrastructure to a new, upgraded infrastructure.

But Microsoft can plan a 14-hour outage (during business hours; another thing I'm not allowed -- and wouldn't think -- to do), and slip outside of it. Repeatedly.

This is not sour grapes ("I wish I could have that much time to do my upgrades") -- it's professional umbrage.

I wonder what their internal Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are? Because, honestly, I feel like they're taking advantage of the fact that their end users can't do anything in the face of a protracted outage.

Maybe Major Nelson will have another podcast interview with ops folks about the delay, where they explain "how complex something like this is".

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SOURCES: Gamespot.com, joystiq.com, kotaku.com, Xbox.com, IGN, GameInformer, Official XBox Magazine, CNN, gamesindustry.biz, and others.

Adam Creighton, Computer and Video Gaming (Subscribe)

Tuesday, March 27, 2007

Microsoft and Xbox Live upgrades ...

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