During the time up and around Christmas last year, Xbox Live had some serious issues.

Sometimes the service was completely down, and sometimes it was just very flakey meaning that you couldn’t play any matchmaking games due to some sort of issue with the service.

For anyone trying to play during these times, Xbox Live is excruciatingly annoying! It is also known to get a bit flakey during popular periods e.g. Saturday evenings. Fantastic for a service that we’re paying for, eh?

Hopefully, having had a year and at least two scheduled maintanence periods since then (one of which was yesterday), the service will cope with the influx of users over Christmas.

Did we recieve any compensation for these problems last time? Yeah, we got a free arcade game (Undertow).

Frankly though, I’d rather have a stable service that works when I want to use it.

So, place your bets: will Xbox Live have problems this year? I’m gonna go with yes, especially with things like Gears 2…

/