One of the first things I do when I come in to work is I turn on my XM radio. I like to work with something playing in the background. But this Monday morning was different. My XM receiver wasn't receiving any signal. A bunch of thoughts immediately went through my head on what was wrong. I thought someone fumbled with my cables and perhaps my antenna was moved. Maybe I had a loose connection somewhere. But all those looked good and I finally thought that I had broken hardware. I was bummed. I tried fumbling with things for awhile but there was no improvement. So the whole day I ended up listening to my FM radio (oh no! haha). I didn't get any satellite reception the whole day.

But then last night I got an email from XM with the subject line "Service Degradation Alert". Here's what it said:

You may be experiencing temporary degraded performance with your XM reception at the present time. XM is aware of the issue and working diligently to resolve it as soon as possible. We anticipate full signal strength will be restored by early Tuesday morning.

That made me feel much better. I'm glad to know that there isn't something wrong with my hardware. And I'm glad to see that XM sent a notification to its users on what was going on. Though it was quite late...I'm sure they knew of the problem a lot earlier in the day. But I'm still glad they let their subscribers know there is a problem and they admitted it.

And this morning, I got an update with this subject line "XM Service Update" that said:

As many of you know, XM customers have experienced service outages or significantly degraded service since Monday mid-morning, May 21.

We quickly identified the problem and are working hard to return to our normal levels of service. The problem occurred during the loading of software to a critical component of our satellite broadcast system, which resulted in a loss of signal from one of our satellites. We expect normal service to resume midday today (eastern daylight time).

XM apologizes for any inconvenience this has caused. For updates, please go to http://www.xmradio.com.

In the meantime, you can enjoy many of our music channels on XM Radio Online (http://xmro.xmradio.com) if you are close to a computer.

Again, we regret any inconvenience for not having your XM Radio service fully available.

As of right now, I'm getting sporadic reception. I'm not sure if its because I changed the position of the antenna, or if the satellite service is not yet back. Hopefully it returns soon, but we all know that it take longer than planned to bring things back online

I'm sure XM learned some lessons from this outage, and I've been a subscriber for almost two years and this the first noticeable service degradation I've experienced. Not too shabby. I still like my XM. Just give it back to me. Now. Please.