We gave you word last night that the Live Maps to Multimaps.com debacle had been resolved, and now we have a bit more explanation, from the Live Maps / Virtual Earth blog:
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.
…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.
Apparently a decision was made to get it fixed, first, and then post on it once everything worked properly, which we appreciate. We are very happy to hear that this wasn’t at all a planned event. Although we won’t leave that this screw-up happened at all un-noticed, now that it’s fixed our UK (and other countries) friends can breathe easier, and it was probably handled as well as could be expected.
Anyway, too bad for the Live Maps team to release this important update, only to have it sullied by a screw-up. We’re going to be concentrating on the good parts of the new Live Maps stuff coming up soon. Maybe show the UK what you’ve been missing ;)