Video game network Xbox Live went offline for a brief period on January 13, Wednesday, causing rapper Snoop Dogg to slam Microsoft and co-founder Bill Gates. The hip-hop artist uploaded an irate video post on his personal Instagram account, claiming he would switch to the Sony PlayStation gaming console if Microsoft's servers were not fixed.
However, Sony's Play Station Network (PSN) also had an outage at the beginning of 2016. The outage lasted 10 hours and affected services such as PSN and PS Now, according to Forbes.
In the video Snoop requested Gates to "fix your s*** man," and argued Microsoft should make it easier to play a video game online. Gates is a co-founder and board member at Microsoft.
However, Gates left the company's day-to-day operations in 2008. He served as the OS giant's chairman of the board until February 2014, according to CNBC.
Microsoft's CEO is now Satya Nadella. Meanwhile, the Xbox team would be more directly responsible for any technical problems experienced while playing Xbox One online.
Microsoft's Xbox One game console has an online platform named Xbox Live that allows global gamers to play from home. However, sometimes both Microsoft and Sony have short outages due to technical problems.
The tech company's support team tweeted on the afternoon of Wednesday that it was aware of the power outage. It reported seven hours later that the technical problem had been solved.
Microsoft reported another brief outage on January 6. It also affected Outlook, Bing, and Office365.
Forbes points out that both Microsoft and Sony had experienced hack attacks and other server problems. However, Sony's issues have mostly been worse than Microsoft's.
PlayStation 4 has bene the top video game console in recent years. Although PSN provides better resolution than Xbox Live, the latter has generally provided a stabler online experience.
One advantage of having both systems is that it would provide a Plan B. Players can switch to Xbox Live when PSN is down, and play PS4 games online when there is an online Xbox One outage.
Gates has not provided a response to Snoop. However, the Instagram video has gone viral.