Microsoft offers free month for Xbox Live users hit by outage

Xbox Live members affected by a recent outage of the Cloud Saved Games feature will be treated to an additional month of membership on the house.

Xbox Live's Cloud Saved Games lets members store their saved games online so they can play them on a different console and pick up where they left off. An outage that hit Xbox Live on Friday also took the Saved Game feature offline, according to gaming blog site Joystiq.

Microsoft apparently spent most of the weekend trying to resolve the problem. And as of early Monday, all issues had been fixed, Microsoft spokesman Larry Hryb, who blogs under his gamer tag, Major Nelson, noted today.

To assuage all affected Xbox Live users, Microsoft will credit them a free month of membership, without having to ask for it, Major Nelson added. Alex Garden, general manager of Xbox Live, wrote in a note:

We want to thank all of our Xbox Live members impacted by the Cloud Saved Games service issue for your patience and understanding. It took longer than we expected to get back to full performance as we needed to ensure the integrity of everyone's game saves. Whether you couldn't access your game saves for a couple of hours or a couple of days, we sincerely apologize for the delay and inconvenience. We will be automatically applying a one-month extension to the Xbox Live Gold memberships of everyone who was impacted. We can assure you we'll also be doing a thorough post mortem to help prevent this from happening again.