"Errare Humanum Est" was Microsoft's explanation for the recent Windows Genuine Advantage outage. The company added that less than 12,000 users have been affected by the mishap.
According to Microsoft's Alex Kochis (senior product manager for WGA), it all went something like this:
“Two key things happened. First, activations and validations were both affected when preproduction code was accidentally sent to production servers. Second, while the issue affecting activations was fixed in less than thirty minutes (by rolling back the changes) the effect of the preproduction code on our validation service continued after the rollback took place.
Nothing more than human error started it all. Pre-production code was sent to production servers. The production servers had not yet been upgraded with a recent change to enable stronger encryption/decryption of product keys during the activation and validation processes. The result of this is that the production servers declined activation and validation requests that should have passed.”
Still, the post doesn't offer users a real apology. Instead, it focuses on the idea that the recent event was not an outage “because in this case the trusted source of validations itself responded incorrectly.”
Furthermore, there is no word on how Microsoft plans to improve WGA customer support. Frankly speaking, reporting WGA issues via general customer support lines or on the WGA forums simply won't do.
Hopefully, Microsoft intends to do something about it. In the mean time, its lawyers are still busy in court fighting two class action suits claiming that the WGA program acts like spyware.
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