Some users are experiencing issues accessing the store

Aug 10, 2015 04:54 GMT  ·  By

The Windows 10 Store and a couple of other apps installed on the new operating system, including Mail and OneNote, appear to be down across the world for a number of users, as some are reporting that they are unable to access them due to what seems to be a server-side issue.

According to their reports, the Windows Store, the Mail and the OneNote apps fail to load with an error that reveals, “the server stumbled, page could not be loaded, please try again later.” An error code (0x8000FFFF) is also provided in the message.

At the time of writing this article, both the Mail and the OneNote apps as well as the Windows Store are all working fine here on our computers, but we indeed experienced some issues on Sunday when trying to update a number of Windows 10 apps.

Possible workaround

Posts on Microsoft Community forums confirm the issue, and although several workarounds have already been tried, it seems that there's no trick that works for everyone.

And yet, some claim that restarting the Windows Update service works, so you could give it a try if you're still experiencing issues with the store.

To do this, launch a command prompt window with administrator privileges and type in the following commands one by one:

code
net stop wuauserv
move "c:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution" "c:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution.old"
net start wuauserv
Some Microsoft users claiming that this solution worked also recommend disconnecting from the Internet while submitting this command to make sure that Windows Update is turned off completely. A reboot is required after running these commands.

Right now, Microsoft is yet to provide a statement on this, but it appears that the company is already working on a fix, as the issue was first discovered during the weekend, so chances are that it's already aware of its existence. In the meantime, try the fix above and let us know if it works, in the comment box after the jump.