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Microsoft: WGA Outage 'Not an Outage'

By BetaNews Staff, BetaNews

August 29, 2007, 12:46 PM

Microsoft said Tuesday that the glitch that caused Windows Genuine Advantage servers to fail this past weekend was due to human error. According to a post on the WGA blog, pre-production code was released on a production server, causing a domino effect of failures. About 12,000 Windows users were affected. The company said that it did not consider it an outage, since when the servers are down, the system is designed to default to "genuine."

"The production servers had not yet been upgraded with a recent change to enable stronger encryption/decryption of product keys during the activation and validation processes," Microsoft said. "The result of this is that the production servers declined activation and validation requests that should have passed."

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By fragmore

edited Aug 30, 2007 - 11:51 AM

Same difference, no matter what you call it, the results are comparable.

Score: 0

By dougau

edited Aug 30, 2007 - 11:20 AM

My question is,
If there is ever some kind of natural catastrophe, terrorist attack, or war that takes out all of these "Genuine Advantage" data centers at the same time, will all computers running Windows XP or Vista world wide fail?

Scary thought as these validation servers are all probably soft targets no matter how redundant. Its just the world we live in nowdays.

Score: 0

By Mystiqq

posted Aug 30, 2007 - 7:55 AM

It was "pwnage".

Score: 0

By morriscox

posted Aug 30, 2007 - 12:23 AM

The system is designed to default to "genuine" if the servers are down? So a firewall entry blocking access to those servers would foil WGA? Hmmm....

Score: 0

By rseiler

posted Aug 29, 2007 - 11:31 PM

Microsoft should have simply blamed Skype.

Score: 0

By rsx508

posted Aug 29, 2007 - 9:59 PM

So, it was really an "innage"?

Score: 0

By methuselah

posted Aug 29, 2007 - 8:20 PM

Jackpot. I was one of only 12,000. It was validating XP on an OS/X machine.

Score: 0

By zenarcher

posted Aug 29, 2007 - 3:34 PM

Sounds a lot like putting lipstick on a pig. ;)

Score: 0

By Paul Skinner

posted Aug 29, 2007 - 6:05 PM

You like your pigs au naturel then, I take it.

:-p

Score: 0

By zenarcher

edited Aug 29, 2007 - 7:21 PM

Actually, I prefer my pigs smoked and made into ham or sausage. :)

Oh yeah...and for my software, I prefer something without WGA or serial number verifications. Probably why I use Linux.

Score: 0

By imafurby

posted Aug 30, 2007 - 12:43 PM

That's called a pig in a poke.

Score: 0

By excelon2005

posted Aug 29, 2007 - 2:35 PM

They're right that it's not an outage, but in order to get a more accurate way to describe this incident, insert an 'r' between the 't' and the 'a.'

Score: 0

By Ryusennin

posted Aug 29, 2007 - 2:13 PM

"Microsoft said Tuesday that the glitch that caused Windows Genuine Advantage servers to fail this past weekend was due to human error."

It is always due... to human error.

Score: 0

By pkscout

posted Aug 29, 2007 - 1:51 PM

So, if WS2K3 follows the Vista path, over the next couple of months we'll be seeing releases about features that have been cut until all that's left is a sort of pretty new GUI and not much of anything else.

Score: 0

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