Are you one of those people who's still playing Halo 2 online?  Well we have some bad news for you.  According to a press release late last night, as of April 15th online support for all original XBOX games will be shut down on XBOX Live.

As explained by Microsoft's own larry Hryb (Major Nelson):

I wanted to let you know that on April 15, 2010 Microsoft will discontinue Xbox LIVE service for original Xbox consoles and games, including Xbox 1 games playable on Xbox 360. Our first step in this process will be to turn off auto-renewals for those members who only use Xbox LIVE on a v1 Xbox. While I can't comment on the specifics, this change will allow us to continue evolving the LIVE service with new features and experiences that fully harness the power of Xbox 360 and the Xbox LIVE community. We did not make this decision lightly, but after careful consideration and review we realize that this decision will allow us unprecedented flexibility for future features.

While we can only speculate what this means for the future of XBOX Live and what new features we might see, one can only hope that we're finally going to get a bump in the number of friends we're allowed to have.  Currently that number is set at a hundred, and Microsoft has said in the past that support for games from the previous console was one of the things holding that number where it was.  So we shall see.