Microsoft extends 'Countdown to 2015' Xbox One and Xbox 360 weekly deals until January 6th

Microsoft is giving Xbox One and Xbox 360 owners some extra time to take advantage of its Countdown to 2015 price cuts. The deals were supposed to end after December 31 but Microsoft extending many of those price cuts until Tuesday, January 6. Here is what Microsoft had to say:

"The Countdown to 2015 daily deals are over but the good news is a majority of the weekly deals have been extended. The following titles will be available at the below discounted prices until January 6, 2015." - Larry Hryb, Microsoft.

For example, you can snag Destiny or Call Of Duty Advanced Warfare for 25 percent off, while you can save big on games like The Wolf Among Us (45 percent off) and FIFA 15 Holiday Edition (35 percent off). Head over to the VIA link below to check out the offers. Grab them while this promotion lasts.

Larry Hryb        ✔ @majornelson

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Are you ready to celebrate? Most of the weekly Countdown to 2015 deals have been extended to January 6, 2015 http://mjr.mn/1rCBR3j 

3:00 AM - 1 Jan 2015

Ringing in the New Year With Deals - Xbox Live's Major Nelson

Happy New Year's Eve. The Countdown to 2015 deals are over but many of the weekly deals will still be available at discounted prices until January 6, 2015.

Larry Hryb @majornelson

Source: Major Nelson

Xbox One: SmartGlass App Crashing Because Of Date Bug

It looks like the start of 2015 isn't going so well for Microsoft's Xbox One SmartGlass apps for Windows Phone. Both the regular and beta versions of the app, which is used to help control the Xbox One game console, are currently crashing for many users on startup.

The Xbox One SmartGlass app  is crashing due to a date bug, apparently SmartGlass thinks that we’re not in 2015, instead we’re back to 31st December 2013.

This date bug was first reported on reddit where someone also posted a screenshot showing the messaging app has started timestamping messages with 12/31/2013. It was initially thought that the bug was limited to the messaging app but this bug is also the reason why Xbox One SmartGlass is crashing on both Windows and Windows Phone.

Twitter users experienced something like this last week when they were kicked out of the mobile apps automatically. On Tweetdeck users saw posts backdated by an entire year and that’s because Twitter’s servers though it was 29th December 2015 already, they jumped an entire year ahead causing those issues. Twitter took a few hours to resolve this.

The only workaround that has been floated on reddit involves moving back the system date to 2013, which isn’t really the right thing to do, unless the only thing you use on your device is SmartGlass. Hopefully a fix will be rolled out soon, shouldn’t take too long to put together anyway.

Source: Reddit via WMPU | Image via Reddit

Xbox One Party Chat and Friends List not Working for Many Users

Xbox Live are now back online but it seems as though the after effects of this DDoS attack, are causing issues for some users.

Some fans took to social media to reveal that they are having issues with Xbox Live party chat and friends app on Xbox One.

Users are not able to use party feature and are unable to listen to their friends. On the other hand, friends list is down as well and players are unable to see which friends are online as all of them appear offline.

Microsoft is yet to comment on this but as soon as they do, we’ll let you know.

As for the Lizard Squad, we are happy to report that FBI has started an investigation as a spokesperson for the bureau stated yesterday:

“The FBI is investigating the matter, given the pending nature of the case, we cannot comment further.”

It’s about time something is being done to stop these so called hackers who have no agenda other than ruining our gaming experience.

Although Lizard Squad calls itself a hacking group but what exactly are they hacking? We don’t know much about all this but we  believe DDoS is not exactly hacking. They just overwhelm servers by sending fake IPs or junk data.