Microsoft to Gift Three Months of Live Gold and 1600 Points to Mistakenly Banned Console Owners

Posted 09/26/2011 at 7:04am | by Paul Lilly

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Nobody likes being labeled a cheat, fraud, or no-good hooligan, especially if none of those things are true. So you can imagine the outrage when an untold number of upstanding Xbox Live gamers found out their consoles had been erroneously banned for supposedly being modified or otherwise tampered with. Oops!

"Recently, it was brought to our attention that a number of customers had concerns about the validity of a recent ban of their individual consoles, which they feel had been triggered inaccurately. In this case, the bans were related specifically to modded consoles. I take these claims very seriously, and after an initial investigation we have confirmed that a handful of banned consoles did in-fact appear to not have been modified or tampered with," Stephen Toulouse, Microsoft's head of the Policy and Enforcement team for Xbox Live, stated in a blog post. "We’re still conducting our review but the cause appears to be a software issue, not an error on the part of the enforcement team’s normal actions."

Toulouse said the issue was very specific and only affected a "very small percentage of users," though he didn't mention exactly how many. Steps are being taken to reverse the mistaken bans, and those affected will receive a credit for three months of Xbox Live Gold and 1600 Microsoft points, as well as this heartfelt apology:

"I’d like to take a moment to personally apologize for the inconvenience this has almost certainly caused to the affected customers," Toulouse said. "You have my assurance that we are investigating how this error occurred and have since discontinued use of the software that was used. The Xbox Live community is the best out there and we regret the inconvenience this may have caused for our loyal members."

Everyone cool now?