Poor Microsoft
UPDATE: Apparently there’s now a quick, temporary fix and a public face trying to find resolution for the problem (via thudfactor). It’s a good move and they’re responding well (well as good as could be expected given that they got into the situation in the first place), but I’m still surprised that a place like Microsoft could have that happen without knowing before everyone else did.
UPDATE 1.5: You know, I’ve been looking around the microsoft forums where this is all going down and reading the posts from the moderator Phil Liu and I’m really impressed with how he’s handling it. Everything is reassurance and roses without any denial or excuse making. And he’s reading all those threads and responding in them. Well done bit of recovery if you ask me.
Heh, just found this thread (via boingboing). Apparently, Microsoft’s Windows Genuine Advantage servers went down which means any XP or Vista machines that try to phone home (which they all do automatically) gets flagged as not genuine. For Vista users this is particularly problematic because that results in their Aero and DirectX being disabled. No games or nice features for you! This seems to happen on a reboot.
It’s a strike against WGA in specific and DRM in general, but the best part of this is from that first post:
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.
Wow, this is going to be the case until Tuesday? The speculation is because whatever dept supports the WGA servers doesn’t work on the weekend - I can’t imagine that will stick as this problem becomes widespread and the real hating begins.
The other amazing part was that they simply didn’t know. I mean, it’s Microsoft not some small tech shop. They don’t have crazy monitoring and alerting going on for their WGA servers? They can go down and nobody is the wiser until the complaints come rolling in? I find it hard to believe, but if someone was alerted and knew I guess it never trickled down to the Customer Service people.
Anyhow, if you’ve got Vista or XP this weekend definitely isn’t the time to be rebooting it. WGA is genuinely something, but “advantage” is not the word that springs to mind…
