Push Notifications to APNS Fail 50% of the Time

Question

Sending a notification to an iOS device fails half the time with this error:
   The Push Notification System returned an Internal Server Error
Here is my setup:
Free Trial version of Azure
Sandbox certificates uploaded to a Mobile Service/Notification Hub
App developed with PhoneGap and built using Adobe's PhoneGap Build service
Using the com.microsoft.azure-mobile-services Cordova plugin
I am able to use either the DEBUG page on the Azure site, Visual Studio 2013 (Server Explorer -> Azure), or the ServiceBusExplorer open source program to send test JSON messages to Apple. It works, half the time, and the other half of the time I
receive the error above.
Steps to reproduce:
Open Visual Studio --> Server Explorer --> Azure. It points to my trial account.
Context-click on my Notification Hub a pick "Diagnose"
Under Device Registrations, I delete any registrations I've previously accumulated. There are now no device registrations.
Delete and re-install the test app on the iPhone (iOS 8)
Launch the test app. A new registration appears in the notification hub. The type is "Native." (I've also had problems with "Template.")
Go to the Test Send tab; Recipient: Broadcast; Message Type: Apple (Default)
I am using the default, sample notification (but I get similar outcomes with other JSON messages):
{"aps":{"alert":"Notification Hub test notification"}}
Hit "Send"; It fails. Under "Message Result:," for my single registration I have this error message: "The Push Notification System returned an Internal Server Error"
Wait 90 seconds, hit Send again. The notification works, it appears on the phone, the message result is "The Notification was successfully sent to the Push Notification System"
Wait another 90 seconds, hit Send again. The notification fails
with the same Internal Server Error that it did the first time.
Wait another 90 seconds, hit Send again. It works perfectly just like it did on the second attempt.
Overall it is working about half the time. In the example above, it worked every-other time, but this is not always the case--it can succeed multiple times in a row or fail multiple times in a row. I'm not changing the JSON at all between
the above test messages. Even if I vary the JSON, I get the same outcome. I get similar outcomes regardless of whether I do the testing through Visual Studio (above), the Azure portal (the DEBUG tab), or through the ServiceBusExplorer program.
What is causing this? How do I troubleshoot this?

Answer 1

Hi David,
I don't have an answer for you, but I wanted to chime in because I am having problems as well. I get the same "The Push Notification System returned an Internal Server Error" message trying to send a test push via either the Debug tab in the manage.windowsazure.com
console or in Visual Studio.
I have been focused on troubleshooting this problem since yesterday (Saturday February 21) but I believe it has been happening quite a bit longer.
At one point I was able to get some notifications through after clearing all the registrations, but now it is failing again. I have had the same certificate since last April (2014) and it has worked fine, so I know the certificate setup is good.
More data points:
using the SimplePush PHP script from
raywenderlich.com with the same certificate, the notifications go through immediately.
Normally we send notifications from our Mobile Service using the Javascript backend, and it gets a "success" response from the Notification Hub even when it fails, e.g.
{"isSuccessful":true,"statusCode":201,"body":"","headers":{"transfer-encoding":"chunked","content-type":"application/xml; charset=utf-8","server":"Microsoft-HTTPAPI/2.0","date":"Sun,
22 Feb 2015 05:05:20 GMT"}}
We have another notification hub with our production certificate, and it seems to be working better.