Apple Temporarily Halts New iTunes Match Subscriptions in New International Markets

With Apple launching a broad international roll-out of iTunes Match yesterday to well over a dozen new countries, it appears that the expansion has come with some growing pains for the cloud-based music service. The service had started to prematurely go live for some users the day before, and several hours after the international expansion users around the world reported temporary problems accessing iTunes Store and iCloud services due to usernames and passwords being rejected.

While those technical issues appear to have been resolved, demand appears to still remain high for new iTunes Match subscriptions, and we've been hearing word that Apple has temporarily shut down new subscription signups in some of the new countries. Customers attempting to subscribe to the service are reportedly being met with the following message:

New subscriptions are currently unavailable.

iTunes Match is temporarily not accepting new subscribers. Check back later.

So far we have heard of new subscriptions being halted in Canada and the UK, two of the countries that saw the service debut yesterday. Apple instituted a similar temporary pause in new subscription signups following the U.S. launch last month.

As noted in an extensive chart from setteB.IT, iTunes Match rolled out in a total of sixteen new countries yesterday: Australia, Belgium, Canada, Cyprus, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Ireland, Luxembourg, Malta, Mexico, New Zealand, Slovakia, Spain, Switzerland, and the UK. The new countries join the United States and Brazil in offering the service.