Same here (US): for most of two days now, iTunes Match gets stuck at the end of Step 1.
In detail, this is what's happening:
The "Gathering information about your iTunes library" progress bar gets all the way to within a sliver of being 100%, and the then the text at the top of the screen reads "Sending information to Apple..." for some 10-15 minutes (haven't timed it, so that's just a guess), during which time there is absolutely no upload or download activity on my system.
When iTunes Match finally gives up, an error message pops up that reads as follows: "We could not complete your iTunes Store request. The network connection was lost. There was an error in the iTunes Store. Please try again later."
Searching forums for similar problems, I've encountered the following suggestions, NEITHER OF WHICH WORK:
1. Turn off iTunes Match and turn it back on again (this, by the way, will mean that your whole library will need to be re-scanned again, which can occasionally cause some tagging inconsistencies and other minor but annoying problems)
2. It's an ISP throttling issue, so either mess with your router's setting to limit upload speeds or use a program like Entonnoir to limit the upload speed of only those ports that iTunes uses
Again, neither of these solutions is working for me, and this thread makes clear that the current problem is probably on Apple's end. They had service outages yesterday (Aug. 7), and so if you're having this problem and you find this thread ca. Aug. 8, I would NOT recommend trying those "solutions" that you might come across on other (older) threads. Save yourself some pain and give it a day or two to see if Apple simply fixes it.
