WGA and OGA Servers Down
link: original article - section: microsoft
According to Ars Technica, the servers responsible for activating new installs of Windows and Office are currently down due to an unspecified reason.
The issue became apparent after several users attempted to activate Office 2003 with no avail, even as early as this morning, and a Microsoft representative confirmed that the servers were offline. Fortunately, this seems to be simply a case of prolonged downtime, rather than an actual activation error, as was this case in August of last year, when the Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) software acidentally labelled legitimate installs as pirated versions. Users affected by this issue can still take advantage of the built-in 30-day grace period until the servers are brought back up.
Update: We're very sorry, but apparently our original story was inaccurate in more ways than one. A new email from Microsoft has revealed that only the offline activations were affected by the outage, which is to say, people who attempted to activate over the phone or through customer support, and that online activations remained unaffected. More updates as they come.
Original story
A few of our readers have written in to report problems trying to activate copies of Microsoft Office 2003. One user has been receiving a message telling him that the service is temporarily down since Thursday morning. Phone calls to Microsoft would result in a message asking him to try activating again later and to call back in an hour or two. Ars has contacted Microsoft and has confirmed that both the Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) and the Office Genuine Advantage (OGA) servers are currently down.
This isn't the first time Microsoft has had such a problem: in August 2007 a "human error" resulted in "preproduction code" being sent to the production WGA servers. This led to many incorrect activation failures: WGA was claiming that users had pirated their Windows operating system when they had not. The problem ended up lasting the whole weekend but thankfully affected fewer than 12,000 systems. At the time, the company said it was a one-time occurrence and that measures would be taken to ensure that it didn't happen again.
This issue is a bit different because the servers are simply down. Users are not being validated incorrectly; they just simply aren't getting through to the servers. Without activation, users can still use the Microsoft software in question, usually for 30 days. If users have waited too long to activate, the software will go into a reduced-functionality mode, depending on which version of Windows and Office you have.
We will keep you posted on the situation as this story develops.
