Windows Phone Marketplace Outage Caused by Scheduled Maintenance

Yesterday, Microsoft's Windows Phone Marketplace service, the mobile application portal aimed at devices running under the Windows Phone 7 operating system, was down for several hours.

At first, there were some reports coming from users who had problems downloading applications from the Windows Phone Marketplace, but Microsoft acknowledged the problem soon after.

The outage started at 9AM GMT on Thursday, and ended at around 4PM GMT, about seven hours later.

The problem was not an isolated one, but affected the entire community of Windows Phone 7 users, when trying to access the storefront, all of them were receiving an error message.

In a post on the company's blog, Michael Stroh noted that the software giant was aware of the issue and that they are investigating the cause, and also promised updates for when the services would have been restored.

Shortly after, he updated the post stating that the service was back online, and also offered an official response from the Marketplace team, as soon as the underlying issue was discovered:

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.

The official statement continues explaining that the actual issue came from a scheduled maintenance performed on the company's infrastructure during the night.

Microsoft's response on the matter continues:

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.

While most reports note that the issue was widespread, there are also some suggesting that pre-NoDo Windows Phone 7 devices were not affected by it. However, as you can see above, Microsoft didn't mention something specific on the matter.