So for the past few days I've been having issues logging into Xbox Live and it has been quite a headache for me as many of the games I play require it to an extent.

First thing I thought was that maybe my Xbox's IP address had changed and I wasn't forwarding the right ports so I verified that they were being forwarded correctly and went on to try to diagnose the issue myself.  I gave up on the problem the past couple days because I really didn't have any time to sit around and mess with it.  So today I started messing with it again and decided to call Customer Support after I realized that the following was happening...

After attempting to connect to Xbox Live my Xbox was prompting me to download an update for my Xbox so I hit OK.  Next thing it does is attempt to download the update... then it fails and tells me to test my network settings (a tool available on the Xbox) so I do that.  It gets all the way through the test with no issues until the Xbox Live test where it then takes about 1 minute to tell me to download a new update (same prompt as before) and if I click OK I end up in a loop of suggestions.  If I say no the test fails and I'm back to where I was before.

Anyway it's ridiculous so I call Xbox's Customer Service and work my way to a rep fairly quickly and after I give up all of my information to the MS overlords the guy tells me that he knows the answer to my problem and tells me to hang on a second.  At this point I'm put on hold for about 5 min O_o.  Then he comes back to tell me that their servers are 'saturated' and that the only thing I can do is 'keep trying'!  WTF

The whole process to attempt to download that update takes about 5 minutes because you can't just go straight to an area to download it, you first have to fail at connecting to Xbox Live.

I guess the whole reason this is happening is because 1) they just released a huge UI update and 2) they are having some sort of sweepstakes for people that update their Xbox's and register their names or something stupid.  Not a very smart combination of things that would inevitably lead to a large amount of stress on their servers.  Makes me wonder why they didn't anticipate it - maybe they didn't care.

Another thing I don't understand is why they don't release the update as a download from their site that you can burn to a disc or flash drive and run the update from one of those sources.  The file size is probably VERY small.  In fact I asked the rep about whether or not I could download it somewhere other than from Xbox Live and the guy tells me the next update they'll have to download on their site is going to be in the Spring of 2009.

Microsoft is just a big failboat and I'm stuck on it.