Xbox 360 Sky Player down, relaunching 'in phases' today

While the Xbox 360 Sky Player apparently launched in the UK yesterday as planned, things veered away from the plan almost immediately thereafter. The service was "suspended" shortly after launch, for what must be the best possible problem in Microsoft's eyes: too many subscribers.

"Unfortunately due to the unprecedented levels of simultaneous demand," a statement on Xbox.com reads, "we did not have the capacity to satisfy all service requests and therefore temporarily suspended all access to the service." The service is being reinstated in phases today, presumably with some upgrades in place to deal with the demand. An earlier statement (reproduced on Engadget) specified tomorrow as the target date for the relaunch -- it seems likely that all users will be returned to their regularly scheduled programming then.