Late last night we started receiving reports from readers experiencing problems with Windows Genuine Advantage authentication. Users of both Windows XP and Windows Vista were writing to say that they could not validate their installations using WGA, and one user even said that his installation was invalidated by the service.
We contacted our sources at Microsoft, who told us off the record that the company is aware of a major WGA server outage affecting users across the globe. The Windows Genuine Advantage support forum has exploded with complaints, as a result, and Phil Liu, WGA Project Manager, says that he won't sleep until the problem is fixed. Windows Vista and XP are affected, 32- and 64-bit versions.
Microsoft is telling users who are affected that they should "try again" later, with some support techs telling readers that Microsoft is aiming to have a fix in place by Tuesday, August 28th. That would mean the outage will last more than three days, given that it started last night (and may have started earlier, we're hearing reports of some users running into this earlier in the week, on limited bases).
Ok, I haven't installed vista on any of my computers yet so I'm not sure how WGA works on vista but... those users on that forum were saying their pc would be crippled once they restarted their computer. So does this mean ALL windows vista computers rebooted between now and tuesday will be crippled unitil they fix the problem?
Don't know rridgely.Still reading up on it and apparently it may relate to XP as well.