The Zune team just send out an email stating the Zune store will be down for up to 48 hours:

The Zune service will be down for scheduled maintenance on Monday, September 29, 2008 from 12:01am Pacific Time, for up to 48 hours. During the downtime, Zune Social, the forums on Zune.net, and all of Zune Marketplace will be offline.

We apologize for any inconvenience this might cause you.

Please check back soon. We look forward to sharing our picks, plays, and recommendations with you in the Zune Social and in Zune Marketplace shortly!

Sincerely,

Your Friends at Zune

Surely Micrsoft doesn't need to take down the systems for up to 48 hours for normal maintenance.. This could lead to believe that Microsoft is finally expanding the Zune business outside of North America and into the world / Europe. If not, the 48 hour window of downtime is an extremely long one which is uncommon for a large company such as Microsoft. Compare it with Xbox Live maintenance which is ofter shorten than 24 hour.

One could also argue that the Zune team is bringing more features to the service however this is unlikely due to the fact it had just released new software/services couple of weeks ago with the v3 hardware//software.

No official announcements have been made about the expansion of the Zune business outside North America.

Edit: Major Nelson is reporting that the Xbox Live marketplace will also be down but only for a "shorter" 24 hour period.

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