The Xbox Live service has topped six million members worldwide, Microsoft has announced - demonstrating that the service is growing even faster than the company itself predicted.

Last year at E3, Microsoft pledged that it would double the subscriber base of Xbox Live from three million users to six million by the end of June 2007 - a milestone it has now reached four months ahead of schedule.

To mark hitting six million users on the service, Microsoft has released an update on key statistics related to Xbox Live - revealing that as well as the 2.3 biillion hours spent playing games on the service since its launch in 2002, Live is also coming into its own as a communication system, with over 2,000,000 voice and text messages sent between users every day.