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The great Xbox gamertag release is in full swing; not going super well right now

Today’s the day — Microsoft has begun to release unused gamertags back into the wild. This, of course, means eager gamers are desperately searching for ones they want to claim as their own.

It’s not going amazingly well.

Stevivor’s own attempts at claiming various unused gamertags has been pretty rough; we’ve found gamertags that have been freed up, but we can’t claim them — Xbox.com seems to switch between thinking the tag is and isn’t free. Searching for a profile for those gamertags sometimes yields zero results, and other times, displays a seemingly unrelated gamertag.

Those tweeting back to the @XboxSupport message above seem to have similar problems. Others have said they’ve successfully changed to a new gamertag, but can’t log in to Xbox Live with it.

We’re assuming most of the problems are because gamers are surely slamming Xbox Live right now trying to search for and secure a different gamertag.

In the meantime, Microsoft’s put up an FAQ about the process here.

Good luck if you’re trying!

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About the author

Steve Wright

Steve's the owner and Editor-in-Chief of Stevivor.com, the country’s leading independent video games outlet. Steve arrived in Australia back in 2001 on what was meant to be a three-month working holiday before deciding to emigrate and, eventually, becoming a citizen.

Stevivor is a combination of ‘Steve’ and ‘Survivor’, which made more sense back in 2001 when Jeff Probst was up in Queensland. The site started as Steve’s travel blog before transitioning over into video games.

Aside from video games, Steve has interests in hockey and Star Trek, playing the former and helping to cover video games about the latter on TrekMovie.com. By day, Steve works as the communications manager of the peak body representing Victorians as they age.