twitter's Journal: M$ Admits WGA Meltdown was an Outage

While rolling out a partial fix, M$ finally admitted that the 19 hour WGA outage three months ago was a real system failure.

While [Microsoft's] Kochis called the incident a "temporary service outage" in his newest post, three months ago, he denied that the word applied. "It's important to clarify that this event was not an outage," he said on Aug. 29, five days after the servers went down [and downplayed the incident].

"I was looking for two things from Microsoft, and the first was that they would acknowledge that there was a failure," said Michael Cherry, an analyst at Kirkland, Wash.-based Directions on Microsoft. ... "Second, I wondered if Microsoft would acknowledge that failures are going to happen, that something's going to go wrong no matter how many drills they have. And when that happens, what would they do? But I don't see anything like that here."

Since the outage, M$ has actually made WGA worse with even more reductions in functionality that will spring up the next time.