Some Xbox Live Gold users have experienced an outage for the cloud saving feature present in some games. Microsoft has now fixed the patch and automatically credited one month of free Xbox Live Gold to the users who were affected. Some were without their saves for mere hours, others for days.

We want to thank all of our Xbox LIVE members impacted by the Cloud Saved Games service issue for your patience and understanding. It took longer than we expected to get back to full performance 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. We will be automatically applying a one-month extension to the Xbox LIVE Gold memberships of everyone who was impacted. We can assure you we'll also be doing a thorough post mortem to help prevent this from happening again.

Again, this outage proves that the cloud is not a perfect solution. Local backups are important, and in this case, would have been easy to do. It is nice to see Microsoft being proactive in applying the Xbox Live Gold credit, rather than requiring users to ask for it. That still doesn't help if you were left without your game saves this weekend.