Games for Windows Live suffers four days of downtime

Dark Souls: sadly, not available to many players right now.

The problem has been known about since Friday, when users started posting on this extensive thread on the Microsoft forums. Not everybody is affected and our own Julian said he hasn’t had any difficulty playing his games, but the scale of that discussion (now onto its twentieth page) gives you an idea of how many other users are having trouble.

Today a representative from Microsoft posted on the thread to say they have “received word that the issue has been resolved,” but some users are still insisting that the service isn’t working. For those affected, Microsoft offered a handful of workarounds that have met with some success. If you’ve been affected (and still are), this may help:

“Some users are reporting success by running the following four commands in an admininstrator command prompt (right click on the command prompt and select run as administrator)
- bitsadmin /reset
- ipconfig /flushdns
- netsh int ip reset
- netsh winsock reset

then restarting their computers, starting their game up and selecting "Sign-in with another account" and re-entering their log-in information.”

Although we haven’t been able to verify the issues ourselves, we’d love to hear from anyone who has? Are you suffering from GfWL fails?

Thanks to Joystiq.