“We’ve been receiving reports on our forum and through customer service starting last night that Windows Vista validations have been failing on genuine systems. It looks now as though the issue has been resolved and validations are being processed successfully.
Customers who received an incorrect validation response can fix their system by revalidating on our site (http://www.microsoft.com/genuine). We encourage anyone who received a validation failure since Friday evening to do this now. After successfully revalidating any affected system should be rebooted to ensure the genuine-only features are restored.”
However, the company keeps mum regarding the cause of all the trouble.
The good thing is that Microsoft managed to solved the outage during the same day (August 25), especially since early predictions pointed at August 28 as the “crisis is over” date.
Still, there’s a serious downside for Microsoft. The recent outage has definitely scored no points in favor of the Windows Genuine Advantage program. The software has been designed as an anti-piracy tool and a failed validation will have a “not genuine” copy cut off from most of the patches and updates. Also, it will cripple the OS’s functionality and deactivate the Aero interface.