What’s better than an apology? An apology with some free stuff thrown in to sweeten the pot and turn those frowns upside down. Microsoft is apologizing for a recent cloud outage that left Xbox Live users hanging with nary a way to access their saved games and will treat users to a free month of membership to try and make up for it.

Xbox Live’s Cloud Saved Games give users the capability to save their ongoing games online (aka “the cloud”) and pick them up wherever they want on another console, as if they just  hit pause and set the controller aside. But on Friday, an Xbox Live outage killed Saved Games, reports gaming blog Joystiq, via CNET.

Now that all problems seem to have been fixed as of this morning, Microsoft’s Major Nelson posted an apology from  Xbox Live’s General Manager Alex Garden and the assurance that the company knows whose services were messed up and will be given a free month of membership.

We want to thank all of our Xbox LIVE members impacted by the Cloud Saved Games service issue for your patience and understanding. It took longer than we expected to get back to full performance as we needed to ensure the integrity of everyone’s game saves. Whether you couldn’t access your game saves for a couple of hours or a couple of days, we sincerely apologize for the delay and inconvenience. We will be automatically applying a one-month extension to the Xbox LIVE Gold memberships of everyone who was impacted. We can assure you we’ll also be doing a thorough post mortem to help prevent this from happening again.

While any outage can be frustrating for members who pay for certain services, getting a free month after only a few days of disruption will likely go a long way toward unruffling plenty of feathers.

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