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Microsoft's volume licensing site goes titsup - again

Weekend 'update' spirals into bloody Monday

Microsoft’s volume licensing site once again went titsup on Friday and was out for several days with very little explanation from the software vendor about what had gone wrong.

Frustrated customers were simply greeted with a page that read:

“The Volume Licensing Service Center is currently unavailable because we are making essential site improvements. We appreciate your patience and apologise for any inconvenience.”

It then incorrectly added that “The site will be available by: 2/21/2010 3:00:00 AM PDT”.

The VLSC portal, as previously reported by The Register, has been dogged by problems since it was given a makeover by Microsoft in December last year.

Since then Redmond has regularly encountered teething problems, or worse still, inadvertently served up the wrong login details to some of its customers.

Since its relaunch the website has been extremely sluggish for punters, while others complained earlier this year that they couldn’t access the VLSC portal.

Microsoft has repeatedly applied patches and updates to the site over the past few months, presumably to address lots of those issues.

Its most recent tweak came just a few weeks ago. Then fast-forward to last Friday, and the site, as reported by ZDNet, was once again having a little lie-down.

The VLSC portal is back up and running now, but El Reg has asked Microsoft for a detailed explanation about what went wrong this time and whether customers can expect the service to improve on its pisspoor performance.

Microsoft closed the site for “essential maintenance work” on Friday evening and told its customers that the update would be completed by late Sunday evening.

However, the portal was in fact unavailable for much of Monday, which vexed plenty of the website’s customers.

“Microsoft completed the scheduled system updates and VLSC is available again. Apologies for any inconvenience,” blurted the company’s global partners veep Eric Ligman on his Twitter account late yesterday. ®

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