Broken Certificates Force Microsoft To Put Windows Phone Marketplace App Publishing On Hold

About two weeks ago, Microsoft deployed its new Windows Phone Dev Center with a completely rebuilt backend infrastructure. While this transition went smoothly at first, Microsoft encountered an embarrassing bug this week that caused it to put a temporary stop to app publishing to the Windows Phone Marketplace. The bug causes issues with Microsoft’s new digital certificates it uses to sign apps and many Windows Phone users haven’t been able to download any new apps since the beginning of the week.

According to Microsoft, this issue only affects phones that were upgraded to Windows Phone 7.5. The company also says that just a small number of apps are affected by this, but the ones that are include some very popular apps like the New York Times app and cross-platform messaging service WhatsApp.

Microsoft says it has identified the cause of this issue and is “already planning to roll out a fix.” The company did not provide any estimate for when it plans to resume app publishing or when users can expect the affected apps to be available for download again.

Here is Microsoft’s statement regarding this situation:

We’ve encountered an issue with our new digital certificates that impacts Apps published in the last few days as a result we have temporarily stop publishing new apps. Please note: all published Apps remain available in the marketplace.

Please know we are working to resolve these issues as quickly as we can and will keep you posted as to when publishing has been resumed.

There are currently only about 10 comments in Microsoft’s official developer thread about this problem.