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Microsoft WGA servers are down

Those servers are central to validate the “Microsoft Genuine Advantage” service. In plain words, they provide the verification that you are really a registered user authorized by Microsoft. But these servers are currently down (some kind of network failure?) and Microsoft forecast about two days before going back to a normal situation. This simply means plenty of problems for the clients willing to authentify themselves, either because they just installed a Microsoft software, or because they upgrade one.

This is a new example of why I am against copy protection and DRM. Pirates will obviously not notice the event and won’t even be annoyed. But legal customers of Microsoft are stuck waiting for the repair of these servers in order to come back to normal use of their software. Clearly, copy protection is not a customer service, only a mean to a sales end.

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Yves Roumazeilles

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2 responses to “Microsoft WGA servers are down”

  1. Yves Roumazeilles Avatar
    Yves Roumazeilles

    According to Microsoft, the black-out was less long than expected initially and there was no more than a little less than 12000 customers wrongfully declared “pirates”. They have been set back into their rightful customer status.

  2. Yves Roumazeilles Avatar
    Yves Roumazeilles

    If we take into account that the WGA system does not completely stop pirates from obtaining full Windows Updates, and that the system produces plenty of errors (like this recent one, or like the more common that leads to a phone call to correct the situation with a Microsoft operator), the overall success track seems a little faint and the result seems quite negative from any point of view.

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