Before I get into the background of what has happened in the last 48 hours with Live Maps in the UK, I should clear up what you are here to find out - For our customers in the UK, http://maps.live.com no longer redirects and will take you straight to Live Maps.

Now a bit of the backstory. As part of our release of the latest version of Live Maps this past Friday, MultiMap.com released an update to their mapping and directions site in the UK that introduced a bunch of new features, including integration of some of the unique capabilities of Live Maps such as Birds Eye imagery. As part of this launch our goal was to introduce our Live Maps customers to the MultiMap site and give them a choice of which they wanted to use. The MultiMap site has some features like Ordnance Survey and Collins Bartholomew maps, tube stops, etc... that are very focused on the UK and well liked by their customers. Our intention was to let our Live Maps customers give these features a trial.

But a couple of unfortunate bugs caused the redirect to not go as planned! One issue was that the MultiMap site was supposed to have prominent links back to Live Maps so that visitors could easily get back if they wanted. Also, web surfers who specifically entered maps.live.com in their browser should not have been redirected at all; only the links from the MSN homepage and other places should have been redirecting to Multimap. But the redirection bug caused all requests for Maps.live.com to redirect to Multimap and was compounded by the fact that there was no link to get back to Live maps. Ugh. it was an ugly situation indeed.

The consumer revolt when 'New Coke' replaced Coke had nothing on this one :-) Our loyal customers in the UK expressed their dissatisfaction via comments on the VE blog, A facebook group, and a swarm of constructive emails. The most vocal were those who took advantage of some of the features unique to Live Maps such as Collections creation, sharing and exploration and 3D surfing; with no way to get back to Live Maps, their data was basically inaccessible to them. We have taken care of this by turning off the redirection in the UK for the time being while the redirect stuff is nailed down. If you are in the UK, rest assured that you will always have access to your Collections and all of the other great features of Live Maps that you have come to know and love.

The whole episode reminded me of when BK discontinued the Whopper