WGA Outage Over, No Word On Cause

Microsoft said over the weekend that an issue with its Windows Genuine Advantage validation systems -- which were causing verified systems to fail and lose access to features -- had been fixed.

"I'd encourage anyone who received a validation failure since Friday evening to visit this site now; after successfully revalidating, any affected system should be rebooted to ensure that genuine-only features are restored," Windows Vista product manager Nick White said.

Microsoft claims only a "few" customers were affected and that the system had been restored to normal function. Due to the failure, some customers may have been locked out of features that are available to customers who have successfully validated their Windows systems.

On Microsoft's support forums, Vista users reported losing the Aero user interface after any reboots, along with features reserved for customers of Vista Ultimate. According to the posts, it appears that the problems first appeared later Friday.

The WGA system failure also highlights what could be a potential problem with the way Microsoft handles validations. Instead of the system alerting customers that the servers may be down, it appears to have instead assumed that the failure meant the system was no longer "genuine."

Even worse, this was happening on systems that had been previously validated by WGA servers. Both Windows XP and Vista were affected, although it appears that Vista customers lost more due to WGA's tight integration with the OS.

What's missing is any explanation as to why the outage happened, or what Microsoft is doing to prevent it from happening again. The company has so far only offered that the problem has been fixed.