MAS Acting up for Anyone Else?

[William Gates]

I'm trying to redeem my code for the Sierra GM, but the MAS is not cooperating (currently on 10.11.6). Most of the times I try to get to the Redeem Code screen I get a "Http/1.1 Service Unavailable" error. Sometimes it asks me to sign in to my account and then it throws me "An unexpected error occurred while signing in. The server gave an error during download: 503 Service Unavailable.". If I am able to get through to the Redeem screen and put in my code it tells me "Code Redemption is unavailable. Try again later." most of the time. One time it went through, but told me I need to accept new MAS terms & conditions. When I hit accept, it gave me "Http/1.1 Service Unavailable" again. It's been like this all day for me (about 6 hours so far).

I've checked the Apple Systems Status page and it's showing greens all the way down. I've even connected to different VPNs to try and get a different Apple CDN. When I connected to Australia (I'm in the US) was when I finally got through to the Redeem Code page.

 

[grahamperrin]

Perform a safe boot followed by a normal boot, then retry App Store.

A safe boot will clear some cached data, and so on … I'm not convinced that it will help in your case (reports of service unavailability) but a clearance should do no harm.

 

[Carlanga]

Just wait 3 days for the official release?

 

[William Gates]

Just wait 3 days for the official release?

That's where I'm at this morning. I'm afraid the MAS is not going to work for me on release day either though.

 

[Carlanga]

That's where I'm at this morning. I'm afraid the MAS is not going to work for me on release day either though.

Why?
Have you tried download a free app first then redeem to see what happens?

 

[fischersd]

That's where I'm at this morning. I'm afraid the MAS is not going to work for me on release day either though.

It's sounding a lot more like it's an issue with your connectivity. Have you been having any issues with browsing?
You also mentioned using different VPN's?
Is the system behind any corporate firewalls? (haven't seen any companies block the ones that MAS uses, but maybe you're at a Homeland Security office. )

Simplify your networking setup. If you're using wireless, switch over to ethernet. No VPN's, shells or any other sort of tunnelling.

Do you know when this started? Typically when things go sideways the first question you should be asking yourself is "Ok, what changed?"

If your recovery partition is working, you could use it to repair your permissions (maybe you got crazy out in terminal and did a recursive change that's messing you up)

Or you could boot from a Sierra USB installer and reinstall over top - hopefully fixing any binaries or permissions in the process.