Wow, Microsoft have a bit of a crisis on their hands over the xmas period. I’ve signed up with XBox Live and am having no problems with it, but my wife also has a profile and wanted to connect too, albeit as a free Silver member just to get a gamer tag (really I feel it’s very cheeky that they ask you to subscribe once per profile anyway rather than once per machine). However, trying to create a Live account out of her local profile failed at the last hurdle with a rather cryptic error message, involving the error code ‘8007065B:0′ and telling me to ‘check your storage device is connected and that you’re connected to the internet’ (both true, I can use my profile fine).

Odd we thought, maybe it’s just an xmas rush, we’ll do it later. However after this she couldn’t use her local profile any more, because it was marked as corrupt. Live asks you to ‘recover’ your gamertag in that situation, but trying to do that led to the exact same error. Tsk. Not a huge deal though, she’d only just started and just created a new local profile for the time being, losing the 30 gamer points she’d accumulated so far with good grace.

Today I decided to look up the error code online to see if it was a known issue, perhaps with multiple accounts on one box or something. And oh boy, is it a known issue.

It seems like in the last few days, a lot of people have been getting this problem. And worse, these are people who have played online for a while, and have perhaps visited family and transferred their gamertag to their 360’s temporarily. When they got home and transferred their gamertag back, they found themselves in the exact same situation as my wife - ie without a connection to Live and no access to their gamertag. I can imagine that this sucks royally if you’ve built up your Live account over a long period, and/or want to play online over the xmas period. Microsoft seem to have acknowledged it now, but seem wholly unprepared for the tumult of support calls it’s causing - whether they’ll clear it in time for xmas, who knows.

I’m fine, and my wife can play locally for now anyway. But boy, way to screw up Microsoft - you really couldn’t have picked a worse time. I think you’d better call the Live engineers in over the holidays to fix it.