The Halo 3 beta slowly sputtered to life last Wednesday as a bug in Crackdown kept players from downloading the game -- Microsoft had a patch ready by the end of the day but Bungie has decided to go above-and-beyond and grace patient players with an extra four days to make up for the lost one:

We realize this has been a pain for many and an inconvenience at the very least. Given the circumstances, we've decided to extend the duration of the Halo 3 Beta from June 6th to June 10th at 11:59 PM PDT. So, you lost almost a full day of play today but to make up for it we're tacking on four more days (and a weekend at that).

Not bad customer support for something (mostly) free, and I'm sure that the Halo fans will appreciate the extra time to spend with the game.