Windows Phone Marketplace returns after 7-hour outage

By Tom Warren, on 5th May 11 5:34 pm with 14 Comments

Windows Phone Marketplace

Microsoft’s Windows Phone Marketplace has returned to life after a seven hour long outage.

WinRumors readers began reporting issues downloading and updating applications on their Windows Phone 7 devices as early as 9AM GMT on Thursday. The Marketplace returned shortly after 4PM GMT, seven hours later. Microsoft confirmed to WinRumors that the company was investigating reports that some Windows Phone owners were unable to access the Marketplace. The software giant issued a rare blog post to confirm its investigations.

Several readers are now reporting that the Marketplace appears to be returning. No official word from Microsoft on the reports or root cause at the time of writing.

Update: Microsoft has now confirmed the return of the Marketplace. “Looks like we’re back up…but root cause is still under investigation. More when I have it. Meantime, let the downloads begin,” said Microsoft’s Michael Stroh.

Update 2: Microsoft has now confirmed that the outage was due to scheduled maintenance that took longer than expected:

“Earlier today some Windows Phone users were unable to download applications from Windows Phone Marketplace for several hours and instead received an error message saying, ‘Can’t get this info right now. Check back in a little while.’ The problem was identified and fixed in a matter of hours. The Marketplace service is now fully available. We regret any inconvenience this disruption caused the impacted customers and our developer community. The problem was the result of scheduled maintenance being performed on Microsoft’s infrastructure during the night.  The root cause of this issue has been identified and steps are being taken to help prevent future disruptions to the Marketplace service.”

  • Smartis

    Perhaps, Hack?

  • GP007

    I think it was a simple server problem and lag might have made it crash or something. Then the loadbalancing didn’t kick in maybe. We’ll just wait and see if MS says anything. But the fact it came back this quick imo means it probably wasn’t a hack.

  • Msisdying

    “No official word from Microsoft on the reports or root cause at the time of writing.”

    Of course not. That would require a commitment to customer satisfaction, communication, and transparency.

    • maeyhem

      Has nothing to do with customer satisfaction, communication and transparency. The first priority is to get the service up and running. Second priority is always anaylsis of the root cause in order to prevent futher occurences. That doesn’t happen immediately.

    • Msisdying

      It doesn’t take 7 hours to put a message on your blog saying the service is down and you’re working on it. Can you imagine Bing going down for 7 hours with no message?

  • OMG55

    The Market Place on my Samsung Focus has been working fine…….TEXAS…..I never experience an outage. I log into the Market place everyday to see what new apps are available so I can track growth rate. My device is great. As for updates, everyone should have patience when a new platform comes out and expect to see a few bumps along the way. If you use third party hacks, why should MS, Apple, or Google be responsible for problems the may occur with the devices after people have done so?

  • http://www.aadjemonkeyrock.com Aad ‘t Hart

    Just wondering if the Marketplace is running on Windows Azure or something else… Does anyone know?

    • Anonymous

      It’s primarily a DOS-based system.

    • Futroll

      Like your brain apparently.

  • Jon T

    Can’t they do anything well?

    Seems not.

    • Anonymous

      It was just a maintenance. Get that stick out of your ass.

    • Mark

      If it was maintenance it would have been preannounced.

  • JeepGuy

    Ooooohhhh Noooooooooooo… Marketplace was down for *7 HOURS*… I couldnt download apps on my phone for *7 HOURS*… So glad they fixed because I was starting to get really angry.

    Ah the world we live in… haha. I love when people get worked up about stuff like this. Take a look at your phone…then a look at the phone you were using 10 years ago. A 7 hour outage with an over the network software store isnt a very big problem IMO…

    • Anonymous

      That’s not as good as the iPhone I was using 3-4 years ago, where the stores run 24/7. And Apple is serving hundreds of millions of users, while Microsoft only has hundreds of thousands. So there really isn’t any excuse. There’s this thing called redundancy … you run many servers and you don’t take them all offline at once.

      Are there any standards you think Microsoft should be held to? Or is any failure easy to rationalize as oh well, it was even worse 10 years ago?

      And by the way, if you look at the Windows you were using 10 years ago, half of today’s Windows users are still using that same 10 year old version.