Topic: Microsoft WGA servers down - till TUESDAY?

[Nemesis]

Link to discussion on Microsoft forums

After several email excahnges with Microsoft on validation problems, I just received this:

Thank you for your response.

I’m sorry to inform you that the Windows Genuine server might be down for few days. I have escalate the issue to our Genuine team, kindly try to validate again on Tuesday 28 Aug 2007.

Thank you for contacting Microsoft Technical Support.

Just to clarify the quote above is not of my own words the "I" in it refers to the author not to me.

So if your Windows XP or Vista is claiming to be pirated you will have to wait until Microsoft can get these mission critical servers back up.    Meanwhile don't reboot your XP or Vista machines just to be on the safe side.

[Just plain old Punisher]

Umm...actually, the safe bet would be to NOT install any patches or updates from the windowsupdate website until the WGA servers are online.

Should be perfectly safe to reboot all you like.

[Nemesis]

Rebooting may trigger a validation attempt as I understand things.  This may make for an interesting Monday morning for businesses.  Not for me I'm on vacation and don't use XP or Vista.

[Nemesis]

As I understand it things are working again but I have not seen an explanation from Microsoft of why it happened.

Now imagine your a small business and this takes out your whole system as you boot up in the morning.

[Tus-XC]

Rebooting may trigger a validation attempt as I understand things.  This may make for an interesting Monday morning for businesses.  Not for me I'm on vacation and don't use XP or Vista.

well it didn't for me...

[Nemesis]

I said "may" because those discussing the issue on the Microsoft included those who rebooted and were affected and others who rebooted without being affected.

What happens to Windows users if something happens to the existing WGA server installation that is more or less permanent?  It could be anything, fire, earthquake or terrorist attack to name 3.  What happens to the economy if that were to happen?  Does Microsoft have multiple non local backup systems in place to start up immediately (in which case where were they in this instance?)?  If they don't have such backups why the heck not?  A single point of failure is not acceptable.

[Nemesis]

Link to full article

Microsoft Corp. said late yesterday that last weekend's failure of the antipiracy process it requires of Windows XP and Vista was due to "human error" and shouldn't be called an "outage" since the servers didn't go off-line. The company also promised that changes have been made to avoid a repeat.

The servers weren't serving regardless of the reason, to me that makes it an outage.