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The story goes like this. Microsoft’s much maligned Windows validation tool, Window’s Genuine Advantage, broke last week. Big deal. The biggest problem was that because of this perfectly legal copies of Windows were being flagged as illegal. If you remember the hype about WGA last year, you’ll see that this was one of the biggest fears people had about product when it was first pushed onto our computers through a critical update.

Microsoft has fixed the problem, and is now coming out to tell us what happened.

A Genuine Advantage

Microsoft

So what exactly happened?

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.

Where does the buck stop?

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.

Why did it take so long to fix?


While the response to the activation issue was quick (less than thirty minutes) the effect on our validation service continued even after the rollback took place. We expected the rollback to fix both issues at the same time but we now realize that we didn’t have the right monitoring in place to be sure the fixes had the intended effect.

Web 2.0 Roundup

It is a bit of a rookie mistake for a company that prides itself on producing “people ready” code. However, like Skype’s little slip up last week, the only thing that this proves is how much we rely on the infrastructure of the web to power our lives. Also, it should act as a warning for Microsoft. When you rely on a web-based validation system, you have better ensure that the system is completely bullet-proof. The damage was minor this time, but an extended outage could be real trouble for them in the future.

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