Windows 10 suddenly deactivated

Sumit 44,316 Volunteer Moderator

Hi,

There is an ongoing issue about Windows 10 suddenly shown as deactivated. T~~he affected users need not to do anything as it is a known issue. Here is what was told by Microsoft Chat support:~~

Microsoft has just released an Emerging issue announcement about current activation issue related to Pro edition recently. This happens in Japan, Korea, American and many other countries.I am very sorry to inform you that there is a temporary issue with Microsoft's activation server at the moment and some customers might experience this issue where Windows is displayed as not activated.

Our engineers are working tirelessly to resolve this issue and it is expected to be corrected within one to two business days

~~Thanks to Vijay_Verma and Danielfor~~ the information.

Thanks to PaulSey..., a Microsoft employee in this thread which has explanation about this in more detail:

We are aware of reports that some customers’ Windows 10 Pro and Windows 10 Enterprise machines are not recognizing their licenses as activated. Users may receive the following notification: “Error: you are running Windows 10 Pro, but you have valid digital license for Windows 10 Home," or one of the following error codes 0X803F8001, 0xC004C003.

We are actively working to resolve this within 24 hours. You can still use your PC; however, the watermark will appear until activation is restored. Thank you for your patience.

We will update this post with additional information as needed and once activations are restored.

Edit 1: Users report that Windows activation troubleshooter might say You have a Windows 10 Home license but you are running Windows 10 Pro. You are advised to ignore that message and wait for the fix.

Edit 2: Update as of morning 11/9/2018 Morning EST.

Any affected customer can continue to use Windows 10 Pro as usual, and the watermark will disappear within 24 hours as activation is automatically restored.

To manually resolve the issue: Select the Start button, select Settings > Update & security > Activation, and then select Troubleshoot to run the Activation Troubleshooter. (If the device is already activated, the Troubleshoot option will not appear.)

Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.

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Anonymous

We are actively working to resolve this within 24 hours. You can still use your PC; however, the watermark will appear until activation is restored. Thank you for your patience.

We will update this post with additional information as needed and once activations are restored.

Paul...

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466 additional answers

Anonymous

2018-11-09T21:08:53+00:00

i still have edition windows 10 pro but not activated i see my product ID and the last 4 numerals of my product key. then i have this message..We cant activate Windows on this device right now. You can try activating later or go to store to buy genuine windows. my 10 is genuine. I get error code 0xC004F034. what is that error please Paul?
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Anonymous

2018-11-09T17:37:16+00:00

Running the activation troubleshooter solved this issue for me around 9:30am pacific on 11/09/18.

I had to re-install windows 10 pro on a device at work. It had been upgraded to windows 10 pro from windows 7 pro a couple years ago before I worked at this company. I did not have the license key for this machine (no sticker on the case, and there were no records of it). Yesterday, on 11/08/18 after reinstalling windows 10 pro, windows would not activate. When running the activation troubleshooter, the result would tell me "we found a windows 10 home digital license for this device running windows 10 pro. To activate using this digital license, you need to install windows 10 home." This morning the troubleshooter activated the re-installed windows 10 pro installation.

This was annoying, and killed some time, but I am glad it is resolved now!
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Anonymous

2018-11-09T17:13:54+00:00

How can I stop getting Emails from people replying to this discussion? I keep getting a lot of them and I can't figure out how to shut it off. It says to open discussion then hit the ellipsis (…) but there is no (…) on the page
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Anonymous

2018-11-09T15:20:20+00:00

To all those that report this as fixed, lucky you.

However, the fix seems to have broken mine .. so thanks for that!

I am now getting "We found a Windows 10 Pro digital licence for this device running Windows 10 Pro. To activate using this digital licence, select upgrade your edition of Windows".

I assume the 'digital' is the downloaded version? That would make sense as I did download the free Win 10 Pro version when upgrading from Win 7 Pro (I still have the original Win 7 Pro packaging, USB, and licence key).

I don't recall seeing anything about it being free for 3.364384 years, after which MS will brand you ~~a thief~~ unlicensed, unless you pay full price ...

So to get this straight .. MS gave away Win 10, then roughly 3 years later, via a critical update, they brand my OS as ~~pirated~~ unlicensed - BUT - If I now pay full price, MS will remove the aforementioned branding. Is that it? So MS softWARE is demanding a RANSOM? You know what that sounds like, right?

When will this version of the bug be resolved?
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