No Frag For You! Xbox Live Outage Next Week

Don't be banging your head on the table next week; plan ahead for some potentially lengthy Xbox Live downtime on September 29. You may just have to get your frag on elsewhere or *gasp* perhaps get a good night's sleep for once.

Today, word came from Xbox Live programming director Larry Hyrb (many of you may instead recognize him by his gamertag: Major Nelson) of scheduled downtime for maintenance next Monday. Xbox Live will go down for up to 24 hours beginning at 12:01 a.m. PST (that's 3 a.m. for East Coast folks). Fortunately, this falls on a time when most rational human beings are fast asleep in their cozy beds - at least in this part of the world. Then again, we're talking about gamers here. Gamers that like to blast the crap out of each other in Halo 3 at ungodly hours of the morning.

As a result of the outage, Xbox Live and the "My Xbox" section of Xbox.com will be down. Also, while you will still be able to read the Xbox forums during the downtime, posting will disabled. The rest of the site should work fine, according to Hyrb.

The maintenance is being done in preparation for the next Xbox experience coming later this fall. For those not paying close enough attention, Hyrb felt it important to re-stress the obvious. "Let me reiterate: When the service returns, you will not have any new features and you will not have the new Xbox Experience update. That will happen later this Fall."