Windows Genuine Disadvantage as Microsoft validation servers go down

Well, what a fun weekend that was. For 20 hours or so stretching across Friday and Saturday, many XP and Vista users became pirates, at least as far as Microsoft was concerned. The validation servers appear to have suffered a major outage, taking along all proof that you had actually bought and installed a legit copy of the OS. When consumers tried to perform a system update or indeed any online activity that requires the WGA server to kick in, they were informed that their copy was not genuine.