Xbox LIVE Network Loses Player Gamerscore, Achievement, and Game Data

Gravity Rush

The details are still spotty at the moment, but some time this morning the Xbox Achievement Servers appear to have lost a massive amount of account data, though the actual accounts do not appear to have been impacted beyond the loss of their Games Played list and all of the Achievements and Gamerscore associated with each account. The impact appears to be service-wide, with gamers reporting the loss on the official Xbox chat boards as well as all over the web on gaming boards.

No Connection to recent changes in the Gamerscore System?

While it does not appear to be connected, yesterday Xbox LIVE spokesman Major Nelson confirmed that the Achievement system for XBLA games was being changed. Games releasing next month will have the option to include 200 or 400 Gamerscore, and 20 or 30 Achievements, and starting in June, all XBLA games will be required to have 400 Gamerscore and 30 Achievements.

Friend Lists Unaffected

Whatever the trouble is it does not appear to extend to the actual gamertag and account files, as gamers are reporting that they are still able to log in and play games online as usual, though many have remarked that they are unlocking Achievements that they have already unlocked before. When gamers try to check their Achievements and games played lists they are confronted by a notice that the page they are viewing is where that information would appear -- if they had ever played a game, which the service claims they have not.

Careful exploration of the dashboard interface confirms that both the Achievements and Awards options off of the blade menu that is accessed via the guide button have been fully de-populated, while partial game lists and scores do appear on some gamertags when accessing the compare games option for friends in your friend list.

When contacted via the LIVE Chat Support, an automated notice appears stating that: "Some customers are currently showing zero achievements and gamer scores on Xbox LIVE. We are aware of the problem and appreciate your patience while we implement a solution." No further information is available via the standard support contacts.

A tech contacted directly at Microsoft who declined to identify themselves confirmed that there are some issues being addressed with the Gamertag and Achievement servers, implying that the outage is temporary, and no data has been lost -- or if it has been lost that it will be restored. The tech would neither confirm or deny that the outage or missing data was part of any scheduled maintenance. They could not say if any Achievements unlocked by players during game play today -- and while the service is down -- will be present when the data has been restored.

In a post to the official Xbox LIVE Forums at Xbox.com an Xbox gamer stated that a support tech at Microsoft confirmed that there is a problem with the Achievement Servers and that they do not expect to have it fully resolved until some time tomorrow (Wednesday, March 14) but that they are working on it.

11:10 Update -- Microsoft Speaks

Microsoft issued an official declaration that the issue has been resolved, posting the following notice on the contacts page at Xbox LIVE:

"The issue that some customers were experiencing with zero Achievements and Gamerscores has now been resolved. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused. You may need to log off and log back in for the information to be updated."

The initial word was good but now gamers are reporting that they are logging on and finding their Gamerscore and Games Played lists still reset to zero and blank, while gamers who previously reported theirs being reset say that re-logging has not worked for them...

Our tech guru here at GU wants us to tell you not to panic, that it is possible that the problem has been fixed but that your console has not updated, and patience may be the best approach. Until the matter is fully resolved GU will stay on top of it for you.

11:50 Update -- Recovering Gamertag Works

Simply logging out and logging back into your Gamertag has some noticeable effect upon its records, though our own experimenting agrees with the experiences being posted about on the boards by other gamers in that while some games reappear in our Games Played List, and there was a partial restoration of Gamerscore, it did not completely resolve the issues.

The next step was to re-download the entire Gamertag file from the Microsoft server, which can be accomplished by selecting Download Gamertag via the Gamertag Log-in menu off of the Guide Button on your console. Completing this process can take more than five minutes depending upon the amount of games/data and when we completed the process after the download and rebooted our console all of the Games Played, Achievements, Gamerscore and Avatar Awards appeared on our Gamertag, and all but one item from our purchased Avatar Items has also been restored, so it seems that downloading a fresh copy of your Gamertag is the way to go.