MS Store India has outage, not processing payments, Urgent attention needed

Question

Other vendors and 100s of customers are reporting this problem.

In the last few weeks, many people using different computers and credit cards from different banks are getting the same error message App-Challenge Failure when trying to purchase add-ons. The app correctly passes the purchase request to the MS Store backend which finds the credit card in their account and asks them to Subscribe. When they click Subscribe, the Store tries to place the order for a few seconds and then gives this error saying 'try that again' and 'Your bank couldn't authenticate this pavement method. Contact them for more info.' The banks insist they have no problem on their side. Its 100% clear it is nothing to do with the App as it successfully passed the purchase request to the Store using the standard WindowsStoreFunctions, which have been working for years.

Store support have not been helpful. They try to blame the bank or the App, which is clearly not the problem here.

We have established that this is a relatively new problem with the Microsoft Store in India. Large numbers of my clients are reporting the same issue. In effect Microsoft has shut down my major market in India. Here is what one larger corporate client reported:

"I asked my team to try with their accounts and they all encountered the same issue. We all have the same answer from different Indian banks (We tried from Credit and Debit Cards). The issue is from the Microsoft platform. We get the AFA authentication as an OTP (One time Password). We get charged a nominal amount in INR as a bank verification. Once Microsoft Store declines the transaction, we get the nominal amount reversed.

I created a new Microsoft account with my wife's name, the issue is the same.

Sadly, my email to Microsoft store support has not been answered."