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Xbox Live players have been having a rough time of things lately, as the month of February has been a disaster with now two major outages, causing downtime. A report from Inquisitr noted the symptoms, and that so far, not much is known in regards to why the system is having the problems it's having.

The Inquisitr report notes that this second major downtime bout hit hard on the heels of a previous major bout of downtime, about several hours after the first bout was resolved. Worse, it also arrives about a week after a group known as New World Hackers (NWH (News - Alert)) claimed responsibility for a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack that hit the Xbox Live service, also prompting complaints.

At the time of the latest outage, services ranging from downloading purchased items, actually purchasing items, and viewing balances and adding to a currently-operational wallet were all impacted by the downtime. A check of the most recent update, however, notes that most every function is “normal” and Xbox Live service is now active. Some users actually found that even trying to play digital games resulted in errors, including a mysterious new error code that didn't have a corresponding listing on the Xbox Live website.

With no idea just what caused this outage—another DDoS attack or a mere technical glitch—it's hard to say how Microsoft (News - Alert) should have responded. One thing that's clear, though, is that in the event of power-related glitches, it's a good idea to have a backup power system on hand, like that offered by Minuteman. With a Minuteman system, a power outage isn't immediate, and allows workers the opportunity to back up projects and successfully close down systems.

The latest loss of Xbox Live, meanwhile, is another shot to Microsoft, which is already reeling from Sony's impressive comeback stemming back to E3 2013, where Sony effectively won the event on the strength of a short video demonstrating how sharing games was as easy as passing a disc back and forth. While a Minuteman system might not have protected Xbox Live from this latest outage—a DDoS attack can't be stopped with any kind of power management—it might well have helped, particularly if the loss was power-related. It's like a kind of work insurance, allowing people to carry on with a day no matter what the power conditions are like. It may not let a full day go on, but it can at least prevent a day's work from being lost due to a power-related automatic shutdown.

When gaming goes down, progress in games is lost. When power goes down, progress in games, work, and everything else is lost. Protecting the power supply, therefore, is particularly important, and turning to a Minuteman system is a great step in keeping that power supply operating.