this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2026
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The Microsoft Store is impressively bad. So many random errors that don't give any helpful information that are impossible to fix.
I have no idea who thought it would be a good idea to give an error code to a user in Hexadecimal form, with no other information.
is hardly helpful at all.
Oddly enough, giving the general public exact error messages ends up costing you in support and reputation.
They obscure the messages because the inexperienced masses start digging up red herrings. Knowledge to someone with zero experience causes a lot of confusion.
The experienced and capable users look up the codes and think about it for a minute, check their vpn, maybe a health dashboard, maybe reboot.
Just about every complex machine out there give error codes instad of real messages, even when they have large displays capable of telling you exactly what the condition is.
Installed Vivaldi and Brave from the MS Store on work laptop from the official pages. Got a Trojan in each that IT had to remove. Yeah no
Couldn't install iTunes because my clock was wrong. That certainly wasn't the ERROR I was presented with, but was ultimately the root cause.
That, coincidentally, was the very same evening that I decided to and did uninstall windows on that machine.
It’s probably because TLS uses your system clock to validate certificates. If your clock doesn’t match the server you’re connecting to, TLS fails and you get an “https failed/connection is insecure” error. And Windows likely uses https in the store to ensure MITM attacks can’t replace valid downloads with malicious ones.
I understand the mechanism, and why it is important.
I don't understand why the error message from the store was nothing more than an error code, and why the MSKB for that code had absolutely no mention of a failed ssl negotiation as a possible cause.
Time->TLS errors aren't handled well anywhere.
As critical as they are to 2fa and TLS, you'd think every OS out there would poke around a few time servers and scream bloody murder if the time was off.
Honestly, I think we, as a society, have leaned a little too hard into time as a precise critical failure point. It's fine for things like GPS that actually require it. but our clocks don't need to be precisely the same to tell how recent a request and response are and we can certainly make better hashing algos
wget will give you a sniff of what the problem is. Microsoft Store will not.
I don't NEED an application to necessarily pinpoint the error. Just even a rough direction. Any browser will explicitly tell you if there is a cert issue. That's more than enough to go on.