Anyone who bought an Xbox 360 this holiday season hoping to play on Microsoft's Xbox Live online gaming service most likely ran up against the outages plaguing gamers around the world. I know I did. For over a week, people with an Xbox Live gold membership, which is a subscription-based account with a fee that allows you to play online, have found their link to Live completely dead or laggy at best. In a query made by The Bitbag to Microsoft, this was the company's unofficial response:

We will definitely be doing something for our Gold members that [sic] weren’t able to get online over the last week.

Online multiplayer is a huge component of many of Microsoft's top titles, such as Halo 3, and the Live service also allows subscribers to access demos, movies, television shows, classic games and more. The bottom line: that's a lot of content people aren't getting access to for two of the most important weeks of the year.

So what could the compensation be, and what would players be happy with? When it was found that 360s were failing at a phenomenal rate, Microsoft extended the warranty of all of the systems to three years and shouldered the costs. While not as grave as that, lets hope the company is relatively as generous.

The Bitbag, via Crunch Gear