Recent XBL downtime due to a flubbed security fix?

January 3, 2008

The service availability problems that afflicted Xbox Live at the end of last year have been well documented, and although Major Nelson did a sterling job with a constant flow of Twitter updates and blog posts, nothing has been said about the cause…

I figured it was a bandwidth/performance scaling problem caused by an exceptionally high demand over the Christmas holiday period, until this, seemingly unrelated story, with the headline “XBL accounts pwn3d, Microsoft does nothing”, caught my eye…

..and that got me wondering if perhaps they’d implemented a number of internal fixes to address the issue and inadvertently screwed something else up in the process - after all, most of the problems with XBL appeared to be account-related; logging on, account creation, account recovery, etc.

I’m speculating here, of course, but one thing is certain - if there was a security hole in Xbox Live that allowed accounts to be hijacked, Microsoft will have done something about it, even if they don’t (or can’t) admit it.

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Posted in xbox