Xbox Live down, Microsoft 'actively investigating'

Xbox Live is currently offline for an unconfirmed number of userss, with gamers left anxiously twiddling their thumbs and awaiting word from Microsoft on when the service will return.

The Xbox website confirms the dodgy status, stating that gamers may experience trouble with "signing into Xbox Live from an Xbox console" and "signing into Xbox Live from Xbox.com". The downtime is also affecting the Zune service.

The service appears to have been offline for over an hour. The Xbox support Twitter account says, "We are aware of the issues some users are having with Xbox Live," going on to say that it is "actively investigating" the borked gaming service. Since then it's been directing concerned tweeters towards the status page mentioned above.

There's no word on how long the difficulties will last, but I'd wager Microsoft is trying to fix its online platform as quickly as possible, before gamers get bored and blow the dust off their Wii consoles, or wander outside in search of more traditional pursuits like stick and hoop or diabolo.

While there's no indication that the service will be offline for a significant length of time, the outage will call to mind the catastrophic PSN hack that saw Sony fans without online gaming for nearly a month, while the Japanese company dealt with 77 million users' accounts being hacked.

Are you able to access Xbox Live? Let me know if you can get online in the comments, or on our Facebook wall.