It turns out that the Xbox 360 Sky Player fell at the first hurdle because too many of you tried to use the service at the same time. In other words it’s all your fault!

Okay, Microsoft isn’t putting it quite like that and admits its own culpability in not being fully ready for the hordes of Sky-hungry punters who tried to sign up immediately after launch. Or, as a company spokes-droid put it:

“Sky Player on Xbox 360 launched on Tuesday 27th October and was met with phenomenal demand, with many tens of thousands of customers attempting to sign up within the first hour of launch,”
“Unfortunately due to the unprecedented levels of simultaneous demand, we did not have the capacity to satisfy all service requests and therefore temporarily suspended all access to the service.”

All is not lost, though, and MS is currently relaunching the Sky Player in phases, thus ensuring that “consumers experience both a smooth sign-up process and high-quality experience”. Furthermore they’re all reeeallly sorry that they weren’t smart enough count the number of UK Xbox LIVE subscribers and take an informed punt at the likely level of demand before they tried to launch the service. Or something like that.

Anyway, the Sky Player is rolling out right now. At the time of writing it wasn’t working where we are, but fingers crossed it’ll be up and running nationwide by the end of the day.

By the way, the recent Xbox LIVE update has nothing to do with Sky Player, or indeed Facebook, Twitter, Last.FM or Zune. According to Major Nelson it just beefs-up security for the Wireless Network Adapter. You’ve all got one of those, haven’t you...?