Left: distribution of the pointing times over the orbit visibility periods for the AO10 XXL observations (black); the blue dashed histogram shows the flared observations discarded because less than 7 ks were usable after filtering. Right: the history of XMM-LSS, XMM-BCS, and XXL backgrounds in the soft band at the centre of the MOS2 detector (after 3σ clipping) from our analysis pipeline. A maximum is seen around year 2010, which corresponds to solar minimum, as expected since the rate of cosmic-ray intensity is anti-correlated with the solar activity (Neher & Forbush 1958). Similar behaviour is seen for MOS1 and pn.