As of a few minutes ago, XBL went down hard. All access was shut off, including access through XBOX.com. Major Nelson's site hosted by MS is also down.

So was the major traffic influx of Halo 3's launch day to blame? I mean they did triple server capacity to avoid this very thing. Microsoft says "no comment". Uh huh...

More on this as it breaks!

UPDATE: XBL appearsto be back up in some capacity. Bungie.Net only lists 3,000 people on Halo 3 right now, but i am not sure if their site has accurate readings. XBOX.com is still not allowing access to Live features.

UPDATE 2: MS has acknowleged that the servers are having trouble, but still don't admit to the full crash that happened. Servers are slowly making their way back up, so while some people will be able to connect, stats, matchmaking, etc may be unavailable for a while. From my investigation, the majority of the servers are still down.