In this day and age it is impossible to blame just one person for some of the absurd, mostly mundane and daily occurrences of the Internet, unless you get on Twitter and rant about something you did. Every now and then you might come across more malicious events like hacking, and if the hacker was good enough, you would never even hear about it unless it happened to a major player like Microsoft. Even though the recent Xbox LIVE outage issues have been resolved, some people would still like to know what happened.
Apparently it was not a botnet attack that got in there and spilled some things, and despite the common belief that it was Anonymous who was responsible despite their denial, this is not the case either. Of course, such a massive service does not go unmonitored, and Microsoft system administrators got around to the situation and the company put out a statement:
"We are aware of an issue members are having sending and receiving messages, seeing friend's statuses, sending or receiving game and party invites, and accepting friend requests on Xbox LIVE. We are currently working as fast as we can to get this issue fixed, thank you for your patience during this time and we will update you with any new information we receive."
It turns out that it was all routine maintenance that ended up having a longer-lasting effect on the server than they would have preferred. This is yet another issue the always-on dislikers can seize upon to show that the there is a downside to a future where every console must be connected to the internet in order to use it.