Passport RMS Service Experiencing Technical Difficulties

UPDATE: 12/2/2009 - Patch is applied. Everything should be back to normal. The Microsoft PG worked through the holidays and everything on this to get it fixed and applied. This was a really quick turn-around given the complexity of the fix. Thanks for the dedication!!

UPDATE: I just received word that the product group is in the testing phase of this fix, and the ETA for delivery is tomorrow, 12/2/2009. 

If you are one of the customers who is using the online Passport RMS service to protect some of your content, you may have noticed that you are unable to open content.

I received this message from the product group at Microsoft.

We have recently become aware of an issue with Microsoft Information Rights Management Trial Service. Some users may not be able to open protected content that use this service. Please note that Enterprise customers using their own internal RMS 1.0 and AD RMS infrastructure are not affected by this issue.

We have isolated the root cause of this issue. To resolve this, we need to make a change to the Microsoft Information Rights Management Trial Service. Please rest assured that your content will continue to be accessible after this change is in place.

It is the RMS team’s top priority to bring this issue to resolution. We will need to devote additional development and test time to ensure a high quality fix . We estimate that we can address the issue which requires the development and testing of a fix within the next few weeks.

We sincerely apologize for the disruption this issue has caused and will provide any updates ASAP.

So there you go. Directly from the mothership. I'll keep everyone posted as to any new developments as they happen.

-Jason