Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) - weekend issue explained - partially We're continuing to investigate what happened but here's a quick update to yesterday's post. The issue with processing validations began Friday afternoon at about 3:30 PM Pacific time and through a combination of posts to our forum and customer support the issue was discovered by evening. By about 11:15 AM Pacific on Saturday morning the issue affecting the validation service had been analyzed and resolved such that validations were again being processed properly. Our data shows that fewer than 12,000 systems were affected worldwide and that many of those have already revalidated and are fixed. This is encouraging news but we want to emphasize that one bad customer experience is one too many and that we're committed to learning from this experience and working to prevent this type of event from occurring again.
We're also looking into the reports of comments made about the expected length of the issue and how support inquiries were handled overall during this time.  I heard a report that one of our support folks indicated that the issues would not be fixed until Tuesday, that was incorrect. We'll be looking closely at how/why that statement was made.
Let me call out here that we take issues like this very seriously and when anything like this happens it receives our full attention. I heard directly from a couple of users yesterday who experienced this issue. They confirmed to me that they were able to re-validate their systems successfully and had no other issues. As I mentioned yesterday the fix for anyone affected by this is to revalidate their system at our site. This can be done by visiting our site (
www.microsoft.com/genuine) and clicking the ?Validate Windows' button in the upper right area of the homepage. For customers who need additional support Microsoft already offers free support for WGA issues starting with diagnostics and other tools and information. In North America support for WGA issues is available at 1-866-530-6599. Internationally it varies somewhat so to find out more about our support options go to
http://www.microsoft.com/genuinesupport (there's a link to technical support at the bottom of the page).
This validation failure did not result in the 30-day grace period starting and no one went into reduced functionality mode as a result.  The experience of a system that failed validation in this instance was that some features intended for use only on genuine systems were temporarily unavailable.  Those features were Windows Aero, ReadyBoost, Windows Defender (which still scanned and identified all threats, but cleaned only the severe ones), and Windows Update (only optional updates were unavailable; security and other critical updates remained available). Also, the desktop message about failed validation appeared.  And as I indicated, these features return to normal and the desktop message disappears when an affected system is revalidated at our site. Continue At Source
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