There were scattered reports today (like one across my desk from some guy named Brad) that cloud saves were having issues syncing today on Xbox Live. Turns out that's true.

A running theory was that leap year, the once-every-four-years occurrence of calendar anomaly February 29, was throwing off the service. Microsoft told me that’s not the case, however.

“We did have a networking issue early this morning that was impacting a subset of users who were unable to access cloud storage for game save data,” said a spokesperson in a statement. “This affected saving new progress and accessing previously completed progress. Once discovered, the cloud storage servers were reset and returned to service. The issue has been resolved.”

If you’re still experiencing sync issues, let me know.

There were scattered reports today (like one across my desk from some guy named Brad) that cloud saves were having issues syncing today on Xbox Live. Turns out that's true.

A running theory was that leap year, the once-every-four-years occurrence of calendar anomaly February 29, was throwing off the service. Microsoft told me that’s not the case, however.

“We did have a networking issue early this morning that was impacting a subset of users who were unable to access cloud storage for game save data,” said a spokesperson in a statement. “This affected saving new progress and accessing previously completed progress. Once discovered, the cloud storage servers were reset and returned to service. The issue has been resolved.”

If you’re still experiencing sync issues, let me know.

odd.

EDIT: I feel dirty...

Luckily I happened to be playing the one game I haven't transferred to the cloud and didn't notice!

....who's Brad?

leap year? really? lol

That's a scary prospect. I just started using the cloud service to house my saves, and I found it annoying how it wouldn't let me use it as a backup only while keeping my main saves locally. This is the way Steam cloud does it, and it seems like the only reasonable way. Instead MS doesn't let you access the local copies of the saves before or after it uploads them to the cloud. So if the cloud loses your save, or you can't access the cloud, you're shit out of luck.

So the forecast is back to normal?

Ha if they did hit the leap year bug that's pretty incredible. That's just first year Computer Science stuff!

And this is why I prefer physical copies and local storage...

Still don't fully trust these Cloud saves, my Gold membership lapsed a couple of weeks ago and I realised that I no longer had access to cloud saves - lucky I wasn't really using the service. I hope you still have access to your saves if you don't keep up Gold. I wonder if they all pop back if you sign up again.

@Panpipe: If you have saves in the cloud and you're not gold you can still access them. You are allowed to copy them back to your hard drive, you just can't save new saves to the cloud.

A solution to this would be for online saves to synch to the console in case the cloud goes offline. That is, have a copy of the saves both on the local client as well as an online one just to be safe.

This is why I keep my saves/files/games/etc. on physical things and use cloud type services as a backup.

@PlasmaBeam44 said:

@Panpipe: If you have saves in the cloud and you're not gold you can still access them. You are allowed to copy them back to your hard drive, you just can't save new saves to the cloud.

Ah, that's nice to know. Might start using it when I go back to Gold.

I still haven't bothered to even use this yet. Someday. Maybe.

The Cloud servers they have now sound like they're a little... weathered.

I guess it's a good thing that I have no reason to use cloud saves.

@patrickklepek I can't seem to get my iPhone to sync with my car sound system anymore, any tips?

(Yeah, I went there.)

@Arker101 said:

The Cloud servers they have now sound like they're a little... weathered.

That made me laugh. :|

I'm pretty sure you save the game on a part of the hardrive and it syncs the data up to the "cloud" after the xbox is turned off. Which is ok with me.

The bad thing about this whole thing is SSX's save system, My file is 101mb for the ghost data and like 101kb for the game data i think. seems like you have to down load both to play the data.

This is why I dont use cloud saves. I know I may worry too much but the thought of losing my saves kills me.

I always try to keep a copy on my memory stick and my hard drive. And on the off chance I only have it on my card and I lose said card, at least I only have me to blame.

But on the off chance I only had a cloud copy and it went down? Then I'll just hate some company for a dumb ass thing.

@Arker101 said:

The Cloud servers they have now sound like they're a little... weathered.

Here you are.

I worry that as we rely more and more on cloud based services, the worse things will be when that service inevitably fails. Hmm, seems so obvious when I just come out and say it.

Also I'm not wearing trousers.

So the forecast is back to normal?

This is why I still use my hard drives for saves. Sure, this was a temporary outage, but you never know when an all-out crash or even hack might obliterate your hard-earned work. I only use the cloud for anything if I absolutely *have* to, this goes for saves, music, anything else that is out there.

I didn't even know the 360 had cloud savings. Is this for everyone?

You guys are funny, do you really think a physical hard drive is more secure than a cloud save at microsoft? ever heard about backups? The only thing that will make the cloud-data you have at any of the major players (Sony, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon) unaccessible for good is a catastrophe so big saved games will be the last of your problems.

@LegendaryChopChop said:

This is why I still use my hard drives for saves. Sure, this was a temporary outage, but you never know when an all-out crash or even hack might obliterate your hard-earned work. I only use the cloud for anything if I absolutely *have* to, this goes for saves, music, anything else that is out there.

Yes, your consumer-grade hard drive is far more secure than a company's mass of servers and back-ups. Perfectly reasonable thinking.

P.S. Best method is local save that is also uploaded to the cloud for use during inaccessibility.

And this is why I prefer physical copies and local storage...

Still have yet to use cloud saves on 360..

@MajorZero64 said:

Still have yet to use cloud saves on 360..

It's great you report these little tid bits, but perhaps we could move them to a news only section and not have them on the front page?

@xbob42 said:

@LegendaryChopChop said:

This is why I still use my hard drives for saves. Sure, this was a temporary outage, but you never know when an all-out crash or even hack might obliterate your hard-earned work. I only use the cloud for anything if I absolutely *have* to, this goes for saves, music, anything else that is out there.

Yes, your consumer-grade hard drive is far more secure than a company's mass of servers and back-ups. Perfectly reasonable thinking.

P.S. Best method is local save that is also uploaded to the cloud for use during inaccessibility.

Those "mass of servers and back-ups" could always go down or be deleted entirely. What if they were down for a week? It's completely possible. Regardless of if it comes back or not, don't rely on others if you can do it on your own time.

It's perfectly reasonable to trust your own hard drive, considering most 360s now have storage in the hundreds of gigabytes.

Cloud saves are great for back-ups, but local storage should be the way it goes when it comes down to files as small as save files, which are in most cases less than 500kbps, sometimes less, sometimes more.

And yes, I firmly believe a local storage medium is more secure than an online server, because you could always allocate that data in case of a crash. I've had a few hard drives crash, and I was still able to recover that data.

Guys...please...

This ain't no news. This ain't IGN... Do I see news on CNN everytime my cable glitch...everytime my google docs freezes for a couple of minutes.... come onnnnnn. I guess you guys should start report on power surges in Quebec...they happen quite often and we are cut of....well every services.

love ya very much...please stop with that crap

I wonder how related this event was with the larger cloud outage.

Is there a feature like PSN to auto sync save files for XBL? It's kind of a pain to manually copy everything over.

I don't get the people that go "this ain't news wheee wheeee this ain't news". Dudes. It's a freakin website. They post what they want, what they think is relevant, what they think people care about. This is not a news website. It's 5 dudes in a basement.

Is something really an anomaly when it happens every 4 years without fail?

I just lost connectivity about 10 minutes ago. It crapped out while I was watching Netflix, and now I can't get to my cloud saves to play any games. Lame.

It's ridiculous that you can't access the local copies of your saves without an active internet connection.

The cloud is only available for Gold members right?