This Has Been a Bad Week for WP7

It wasn’t a great week to be a Windows Phone 7 user.

The Windows Phone Marketplace was down for anywhere between seven and ten hours on May 4-5 (depending on whose account you believe), with many users unable to purchase and/or download applications. Then, on May 6, many Windows Phone 7 users were reporting they were unable to access Xbox Live from their phones.

Microsoft has provided very little, by way of explanation, for the Marketplace outage. This is the only information available, a spokesperson said, which posted to the Windows Phone blog late last night:

“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.”

Microsoft isn’t sharing any details about “the root cause” that happened during scheduled maintenance (maintenance about which Microsoft didn’t forewarn its customers).

The May 6 Xbox Live access problem which hit Windows Phone users is seemingly unrelated to the Marketplace issue. According to the Xbox Live service status page: