Product activation is something that's been bugging computers users for years now, and whilst the inconvenience to users has been somewhat minor, it appears that the Doomsday-esque scenario of activations being impossible due to a technical fault seems to have struck. Of all the companies that it could have hit, BoingBoing is reporting that it has hit a rather large and dominant player in the software activation world: Microsoft. Redmond's own Windows Genuine Advantage systems apparently failed, causing any activation requests to fail, resulting in the (legitimate) copies of Windows being marked as counterfeit and reducing the feature set to users.

If that weren't bad enough, the article also mentions that Microsoft is recommending people refrain from retrying activation until Tuesday the 28th of August. If you're unfortunate enough to get caught in this let us know in the comments.