It only seems like the other day when we were first wowed by the likes of Ghost Recon's online experience over Xbox live, but did you know that Xbox live celebrates its four-year anniversary next month?

The Xbox live service has been a huge success and Microsoft have now released some impressive figures to boast about the continuing rise of users. The Xbox live service now has over 4 million users worldwide and is expected to hit the 6 milion mark by summer 2007.

Here are some of the other figures currently being banded about:

• More than 70 million pieces of content downloaded in Xbox Live Marketplace's first 11 months.

• Over 12 million Xbox Live Arcade downloads in that same period, with a trial-to-purchase ratio of 24 per cent (Uno leads all Arcade titles with a 50 per cent trial-to-purchase ratio).

• Time logged on Xbox Live playing games has surpassed two billion hours.

• More than 9 million text and voice messages are sent over Xbox Live each week.

Xbox live was down for some scheduled maintenance this week, and although we're not sure exactly sure what they were up to, we do know that Microsoft were experiencing some problems. Xbox.com is also being updated and was offline for over 24 hours. We can't see any changes at the moment, but we did spot this message in our privacy settings 'Member Content: Decide whether you can acess content created by other people on Xbox Live.' Interesting...