If you are reading this story at the time of writing – perhaps in between bites of your early morning bacon buttie and bouts of Team Fortress 2 on your beloved Xbox 360 – you have approximately three minutes left to enjoy the online fun. From approximately 8.01 BST Xbox LIVE will be taken offline for anything up to 24 whole Earth hours.

As frustrating as it is (and it really is) this is all for the betterment of your Xbox LIVE experience in the longer term. Once LIVE is down Microsoft engineers will be beavering away preparing the service for some of the good stuff in prospect – Facebook, Twitter, Zune and heck knows whatever else Microsoft has up its corporate sleeves.

None of the above will be available when Xbox LIVE comes back online – in fact it’s unlikely that you’ll notice anything new at all. However, the new features will, in theory, be able to fire up without a hitch when they do eventually launch. So, far better a little inconvenience now than further down the line, right?

Anyway, that’s your heads-up. And this time tomorrow it’ll all seem like a distant memory as you gleefully avail yourselves of the new LIVE Arcade games MS has planned – Magic: The gathering Duels of the Planeswalkers and Sam & Max save the World.