Through a process failure on our part, the Modern Warfare 2 Stimulus Package was released this morning before the Title Update (TU) for MW2 was available.

Unfortunately, the Stimulus Package doesn’t function correctly without the TU. Once they had been released out of order, it wasn’t a simple thing for us to resolve. For a couple of hours the result was unpredictable but most people couldn’t get into a game through matchmaking. In technical terms, it was a big hairball that we had to unwind.

The TU and Matchmaking issues were resolved shortly after 11AM Pacific. Unfortunately, we’re still working through some billing issues. These are primarily around the redeeming of POSA cards – POSA stands for “Point of Sale Activation”. These are the cards that you buy at a retail store that they then activate for you at the checkout register. Some cards that were properly activated at the retailer are reporting back to us as not having been activated yet. You haven’t done anything wrong, you won’t lose your money, and you don’t need to go back to the store – just hang in there and try again in a few hours. The Stimulus Package has been so popular that our POSA vendors that make those magic point cards work are a little backed up.

Other billing features are seeing intermittent problems as well, but at a far lower rate than POSA redemption. You’re most likely to notice this when trying to redeem a code through Xbox.com, but you may see it on the console as well. The team has been working all of these issues on your behalf nonstop, and will continue to do so until the last of them are resolved.