I updated many (near 50) virtual Win10 machines to the latest release build.  Took about two hours per machine.  At least some of those machines no longer were able to access the Store.

I love reading “Check with your IT or system administrator” because that’s me.

Google has a lot of results for 0x80070EC, but including Win10 and Store helped me track down a Registry key location.  Since we have no Group Policy in place concerning the Store, I went ahead and remove the restriction.  You can find the key in question at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE –> SOFTWARE –> Policies –> Microsoft –> WindowsStore and it’s called RemoveWindowsStore.

You want to change that 1 to a 0.

No reboot required.  Go Store all you want.