Xbox Live's cloud features were unavailable over the weekend, leaving Xbox Live Gold members without an option to store their saved games on Microsoft's (News - Alert) servers. Any games already stored on the servers were also inaccessible.

Reports of server troubles first appeared online early Friday evening, with various users commenting on inconsistencies and error messages. While the root of the problem has not yet been declared, Microsoft has published that the issue has been ironed out as of Monday morning.

 “I was pretty majorly impacted,” wrote Xbox forum user CXK. “All of my saves were in the cloud since I have multiple 360s in house, so game time was cancelled. I asked Xbox support about it but was surprised to see it took so long to be fixed.”

In order to make good with their customers, Microsoft revealed that affected members would automatically receive a complimentary one month subscription to Xbox Live Gold.

Alex Garden, the general manager of Xbox Live, apologized to the members impacted by the Cloud Saved Games service issue. He noted that it took longer than expected to get back to full performance and that the company is doing a post mortem to help prevent a similar situation from happening again.

"It took longer than expected as we needed to ensure the integrity of everyone's game saves. Whether you couldn't access your game saves for a couple of hours or a couple of days, we sincerely apologize for the delay and inconvenience," said Garden.

Microsoft's Larry Hyrb - better known as Major Nelson, the director of programming for Xbox Live – reports that users will not need to contact Microsoft or submit a ticket in order to be compensated for the downtime. Microsoft reportedly already has a full list of those whose saved games were briefly unavailable and will be distributing the free bonuses soon.