They f'd up 11 days since Microsoft f'd up
Broke 0.4 Vistas Mitigated well documented Dec 26, 2024 their #59 worst broke on record

The holiday cloud gaming queue: three hours to maybe play

Xbox Cloud Gaming showed inflated multi-hour queues over the 2024 holidays

↳ caused by Cloud Gaming holiday queue failures (December 2024)

The market's verdict: -4.7% on MSFT in the week after.

Status: Mitigated

What actually happened

Starting the afternoon of December 26, 2024, Xbox Cloud Gaming displayed incorrectly high wait times, regularly three hours or more, right as every new console and gift card holder tried to play at once. The status page acknowledged an incorrectly high wait time, a phrase doing heroic work, and never did publish a full explanation. Users pointed at an Azure datacenter power failure; Microsoft did not confirm. The previous holiday outage was 2007, and that one at least sent a fish game as an apology. This one sent a queue position.

This one is well documented.

They did it more than once

Before that: Xbox Live went down for the holidays; the apology was one arcade game (Dec 2007)

Holiday capacity planning, 2024 edition. At least 2007 sent a free game.

Links

  • Impact
    • CNET (publication)

↳ caused by Cloud Gaming holiday queue failures (December 2024)

Timeline

  • Dec 26, 2024 Mitigated Microsoft put safeguards around it.