You can no longer activate Windows online via phone

Without any official announcement, Microsoft has effectively disabled one of the few remaining offline Windows activation methods, activation by phone. The change went unnoticed, but users began to experience problems in the fall.

The first complaints appeared in November. A user under the nickname 3K then described his experience on the official Microsoft Learn community forum, indicating that he followed the instructions from the company’s own reference materials. As before, telephone activation is available through the standard path in the system: the activation section in Windows settings with the activation by phone option selected.

Later, another user, Ben Kleinberg, drew attention to the situation, who posted a video on YouTube. According to him, telephone activation does not work on several versions of Windows at once, including Windows 11, Windows 10 and even Windows 7. When trying to use this method, the user hears an automated voice message stating that product activation support has been switched to online mode, and to complete the procedure, it is suggested to go to a special web port.

Ways to activate Windows

Formally, one could assume that such an outdated activation method has long been decommissioned. However, the problem is that Microsoft still indicates telephone activation as a valid option in the documentation. For some users, especially those working with older versions of operating systems, this remains important. In such cases, online activation is either unavailable or works unstable due to the gradual shutdown of servers for outdated OSes.

In Ben’s case, phone activation was required because he used an OEM key that couldn’t be activated directly in Windows 7. The activation servers for this version of the system are almost completely out of service. After calling the automated line, the user received an SMS with a link to the online activation portal, but when he went through it, the system immediately demanded a Microsoft account login. This effectively nullifies the very idea of ​​offline activation, for which the phone method existed.

Additional difficulties arose at the stage of working with the browser. At first, Ben could not get a confirmation code on his iPhone when using Firefox, but after switching to Safari, the problem disappeared. As a result, he still received the necessary codes and was able to activate Windows 7 and Office, but the experiment itself only confirmed the main conclusion: phone activation no longer works, despite the fact that it formally continues to exist in Microsoft’s reference materials.

Against this backdrop, it is worth recalling that in December the company also closed a vulnerability that allowed for pirated activation of Windows via KMS. Together, these steps indicate a gradual rollback of all alternative and offline activation mechanisms, even if they are still mentioned in official documentation.