When Product Activation goes bad

Slashdot have a story concerning a major outage in the "Windows Genuine Advantage" servers.  This outage resulted in a large number of genuine, legitimate installations of Microsoft Windows products incorrectly identifying themselves as "non-genuine" with a subsequent lessening of functionality [see e.g. this or this] -- presumably to encourage those damn dirty software pirates to buy a copy of the real thing.  Even though they already had.

Microsoft have dropped the ball on this one.  Even though the problem is now fixed, and they have apologised, and provided instructions on how to rectify systems that were incorrectly stigmatised as non-genuine during this period, this demonstrates what can happen when even apparently-well intentioned DRM systems malfunction.  No word on whether any compensation will be forthcoming, but Microsoft have their EULA's to hide behind, so I doubt this will happen, possibly except as a goodwill gesture and without admission of liability.

If my business had been disrupted by something such as the inadvertent activation of the MS Office "kill switch" described in this article, or I was prevented from working on an assessment item for university by it, I would be wanting Microsoft's corporate head on a platter, and some monetary compensation.