UPDATE: According to this article, people are saying the Marketplace is back online. It was down for about 7 hours, and there hasn’t been an official statement from Microsoft as to what caused the outage.

There are reports going around this morning that the Microsoft Marketplace for Windows Phone 7 devices is down, throwing an error that says “Can’t get this info right now. Check back in a little while.” I didn’t bring my WP7 device to work today, so I can’t check it out on my Surround, but so far the reports are that it only seems to affect those that have NoDo (build 7390 or higher) and its been down for at least the past 4 hours. Its also been reported that its worldwide. Microsoft has only given the following statement, “We are investigating these reports and will provide an update when we have more to share.”

For our WP7 users out there, are you experiencing this problem too? Please provide your build number and the phone you’re using.

Source: WinRumors

If you have the new Sprint HTC Arrive, you don’t need to worry about this since your phone already has the NoDo (v7390) update installed stock. For those of us GSM users out there that have the HD7, Focus, Surround, etc, there’s now a way we can “trick” Zune into updating our phones to NoDo too!

This thread at XDA has the instructions for you. But basically you have to registry unbrand your phone using the “000-88” registry hack. Then you download a Network Connection PBK file to connect to a network in Hungary. Disable WiFi on your phone, connect it to the PC with Zune, then go to the Cellular settings menu.

Now for the tricky part. You have to time this just right or it won’t work. It took me probably 15 tries to get it to work on my Surround. You tell Zune to check for phone updates, but before it says “Your Up-to-date”, you have to disable your phone’s data connection. If you do it too early, you’ll get an error that it can’t check for updates. If you wait too long, it’ll say that you’re up-to-date. But, if you do it just right, it’ll say the March 2011 update is available. You might want to cross all of your fingers and toes too, because you could be trying to get the right combination for hours before it actually works for you.

So for our GSM users out there, have you tried this and did it work? If it did, how many tries did it take you? I know I’m glad I don’t have to wait around for At&t to “test” this update!