What could be more Genuine Windows then this?

According to Ars Technica, It appears that Microsoft’s Windows Genuine Advantage service is suffering a worldwide outage:

Windows Genuine Advantage suffers worldwide outage, problems galore:
Late last night we started receiving reports from readers experiencing problems with Windows Genuine Advantage authentication. Users of both Windows XP and Windows Vista were writing to say that they could not validate their installations using WGA, and one user even said that his installation was invalidated by the service.

We contacted our sources at Microsoft, who told us off the record that the company is aware of a major WGA server outage affecting users across the globe. The Windows Genuine Advantage support forum has exploded with complaints, as a result, and Phil Liu, WGA Project Manager, says that he won’t sleep until the problem is fixed. Windows Vista and XP are affected, 32- and 64-bit versions….

…Right now we don’t have official word on a cause, but one source with familiarity with WGA tells us that the issue may be caused by updates to the service that were required after Microsoft expanded the number of activations keys available for Windows XP. However, the sense we get from Phil Liu is that Microsoft is pretty much in the dark right now.

Update:  8/30/07 – I wanted to follow-up on this post with the cause and results.

So, what happened? Pre-production code was sent to the live WGA servers, causing it to be unable to encrypt/decrypt incoming product keys from machines in the activation and validation process. The problem only existed for half an hour, but 12,000 systems were affected. Those machines had to re-activate to get back to full functionality.

via InsideMicrosoft

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