Microsoft has revealed a few more details on the [Windows Genuine Advantage server failure][3] over the weekend, which left users of legitimate copies of Windows without access to Aero, ReadyBoost, Windows Defender or Windows Update.

Microsoft is now reporting that the outage affected less than 12,000 users, which is just a small fraction of worldwide users, but still a healthy amount of peeved customers and many more undoubtedly less sure about the system.

Alex Kochis, a Microsoft senior product manager for WGA, [writes in a post to the WGA blog][1] that Microsoft first learned of the outage "through a combination of posts to our forum and customer support." That Microsoft learned of the problem from users rather than from its own system would seem to indicate that the WGA servers lack proper system monitoring tools.

It would seem that Microsoft's did not have a backup in place for the WGA servers, which makes it all the more remarkable that this hasn't happened before. 

In addition to possible shortcomings in the WGA server setup, the incident has highlighted another issue with WGA, which is the means by which users can get help. With its current setup, users are limited to reporting issues through the general customer support lines and the WGA forums. 

Interestingly while Kochis writes that Microsoft wants to "emphasize that one bad customer experience is one too many and that we're committed to learning from this experience and working to prevent this type of event from occurring again," the company doesn't seem to have offered an apology to users. It might be meaningless, but it would be nice if Microsoft could at least admit they screwed up, the way Skype did when [its network recently went down][4].

As we mentioned yesterday, if your system was affected by the WGA outage, be sure to [head over to the WGA site][2] and click "Validate Now."

[1]: http://blogs.msdn.com/wga/archive/2007/08/27/update-on-validation-issues.aspx
[2]: http://www.microsoft.com/genuine/
[3]: http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/2007/08/server-error-la.html
[4]: http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/2007/08/windows-update-.html