Chances are if you’ve been on Xbox Live over the last little bit you have experienced a wee bit of a different experience than usual. The inclusion of access to new free content on the Live Marketplace and of course an unusal amount of people playing co-op games of which the likes have never been seen other than maybe the release of this past February’s Crackdown or last year’s Gears of War maybe taking a toll on the Live servers.

To add to the weirdness of Xbox Live at the moment is the inability to access the Live Marketplace at all. I myself have not checked the Marketplace recently to experience this claim myself, but it no doubt is an issue for quite a few right now. User’s of Xbox.com might also notice that the My Xbox portion of the site has been disabled as well(My Xbox has now been re-enabled). All terrible things, yes, but have you experienced the guide locking up because of the Live server strain? This in turn causes you to believe that the guide itself and therefore your 360 has frozen when it actually is the guide waiting for a response from the Live servers for a update of presence information from the people on your friends list.

There’s no doubt that Halo 3 is a force to be reckon with, hence the 20 out of 22 people online at the moment on my friends list all playing Halo 3. It’s a fantastic game no doubt, so let’s hope that “e”and his team up at Xbox are working to figure this thing out. Our own “Thrills Killa” sent me a invite twice to only not be able to play. Whether or not that occurrence is a victim of Xbox Live strain or not is a great question, but lets just hope it doesn’t last for too long.

Are you experiencing any problems with Xbox Live?

[Update 1]

Major Nelson has posted this over on his blog:

If you are having an issue with Xbox LIVE, keep an eye on the Xbox LIVE Service Status section of the support page. (Orange box, right column) The operations center will be updating that throughout the evening until the issues of subsided. I am travelling back to Seattle tomorrow, so keep an eye on my Twitter site as I will update it when I hear from e.

-William “thewilleffect” Bell-