From the Newsdesk

Users reporting failed Windows and Office validations (Updated)

By Emil Protalinski | Published: July 18, 2008 - 06:03PM CT

Update

According to Microsoft, the issue is not related to OGA or WGA, but strictly to offline activation, which is now available again. Microsoft sent Ars the following statement in an e-mail (timeframe doesn't seem to correspond with user reports):

On July 18th at approximately 10:15a until 1:25p Pacific, customers who were trying to activate their copies Windows XP or Office offline (which is to say over the phone or by calling in to customer support) were unable to do so due to an outage of the system that processes the product activation keys.

Microsoft is still investigating the number of customers impacted by this issue. Users who could not activate offline were told to try to activate later and were able to use their software normally. Online activation systems were unaffected, so customers activating over the web would not have noticed anything unusual. No copy of Windows XP or Office was identified as non-genuine since validation in WGA or OGA and activation are actually separate processes.

Original story

[image] A few of our readers have written in to report problems trying to activate copies of Microsoft Office 2003. One user has been receiving a message telling him that the service is temporarily down since Thursday morning. Phone calls to Microsoft would result in a message asking him to try activating again later and to call back in an hour or two. Ars has contacted Microsoft and has confirmed that both the Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) and the Office Genuine Advantage (OGA) servers are currently down.

This isn't the first time Microsoft has had such a problem: in August 2007 a "human error" resulted in "preproduction code" being sent to the production WGA servers. This led to many incorrect activation failures: WGA was claiming that users had pirated their Windows operating system when they had not. The problem ended up lasting the whole weekend but thankfully affected fewer than 12,000 systems. At the time, the company said it was a one-time occurrence and that measures would be taken to ensure that it didn't happen again.

This issue is a bit different because the servers are simply down. Users are not being validated incorrectly; they just simply aren't getting through to the servers. Without activation, users can still use the Microsoft software in question, usually for 30 days. If users have waited too long to activate, the software will go into a reduced-functionality mode, depending on which version of Windows and Office you have.

We will keep you posted on the situation as this story develops.