According to Ars Technica, the servers responsible for activating new installs of Windows and Office are currently down due to an unspecified reason. The issue became apparent after several users attempted to activate Office 2003 with no avail, even as early as this morning, and a Microsoft representative confirmed that the servers were offline. Fortunately, this seems to be simply a case of prolonged downtime, rather than an actual activation error, as was this case in August of last year, when the Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) software acidentally labelled legitimate installs as pirated versions. Users affected by this issue can still take advantage of the built-in 30-day grace period until the servers are brought back up.Update: We're very sorry, but apparently our original story was inaccurate in more ways than one. A new email from Microsoft has revealed that only the offline activations were affected by the outage, which is to say, people who attempted to activate over the phone or through customer support, and that online activations remained unaffected. More updates as they come.
Link: Story at ArsTechnica
Yes. This article
iswas innacurate. WGA and OGA have nothing to do with activating Office or Windows, only validating that the copy is legitimate. Apparently the issue was the opposite Ars made it look like: on-the-phone activation was where the problem was.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:
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.
Last edited by GreyWolfSC on 19 Jul 2008 - 03:23
As for strekship, that's exactly what I did, took a little less than 5 mins to sort out over the phone
In order for your customers to be able to use the software you sell them, you HAVE TO continually support an special server farm that never can never have significant downtime.
Hey, look: Instant additional unnecessary operating overhead!
Last edited by Airlink on 19 Jul 2008 - 08:10
Instead on focusing more resources in improving the product, they are just beating the death horse.
Please microsoft eliminate this DRM useless nonsense that only cause problems, do not combat piracy at all and only give headache to legit users.
Instead on focusing more resources in improving the product, they are just beating the death horse.
Please microsoft eliminate this DRM useless nonsense that only cause problems, do not combat piracy at all and only give headache to legit users.
Activation and WGA aren't DRM. Stop confusing the two.
Oh wait...
He then brings the computer back to my store wanting to return it, where I just rearm.
At least with SP1 this will change a bit.
Nope. Recent study showed that in many cases call centre staff take on a western sounding name and accent - normally an American one.
The only company I've found so far that still has a local call centre is Apple, which actually has a call centre located in Australia for the Australia/NZ customers.
How about putting your country in your profile - then we'd know what you're talking about.
Microsoft doesn't have one in New Zealand - we either get an indian call centre of an american one, or an indian one where people put on american accents. What ever the case, they have great difficulty understanding NZ english.
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