On Thursday evening, the Microsoft Xbox Live service was unreachable, joining the likes of Twitter and Facebook which also went down this week, crippling millions of its users around the world.

Most of North America was wrapped with darkness, and gamers wanting to connect could not.

Some players expect that Microsoft was only performing maintenance, but it seemed to be a more critical issue as its www.xbox.com/networkhelp/ and xbox.com/support are all also out of service.

Microsoft hasn't yet issued any report about the incident.

Twitter and Facebook also suffered from an outage yesterday which also crippled its millions of users around the world from using the services.

Twitter post a message in its blog which read:

Twitter is the target of a denial of service attack. Attacks such as this are malicious efforts orchestrated to disrupt and make unavailable services such as online banks, credit card payment gateways, and in this case, Twitter for intended customers or users.

As for Facebook, the popular social-networking site did not release any official reason as to why the site is slow and at times, unresponsive.

Earlier this week on Monday, sites operated by Gawker Media crashed and it was later believed to be the result of a DDoS attack against The Consumerist blog, which is owned by Consumers Union but whose content is hosted by Gawker Media.

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