This may be useful as i found an rss feed which shows the status of xbox live.

http://notice.xbox.com/xml/en-GB/servicestatus.xml

looks good, Eric will have to take a look at this
thanks a lot

Wow, sorry I didn't get to this sooner. Thank you for the link, I'll be sure to incorporate the feed into our current service.

Thanks again, you're the man!

I used to have a bunch of XML links from the XCDP, but now these links return white pages so i'm unsure what Microsoft did but they no longer work.

Aaah.. XCDP *drools* If only this site came one year earlier. It appears as though the feed works from that 1PM to 6PM time slot so it appears to be up the whole 24 hours of the day. I'll be working on a Youtube video for the verification process soon. One that is better than the one that is up now.

I have an catch card so i could record any steps that a user can take on the xbox360 if they have not correctly set up and Live account.