Why am I getting a "Activate Windows" warning?

I recently had a local disaster at my place of residence. A pipe decided to fail and flooded almost the entire living area and forced me into a temporary residence. Fortunately, I'm able to save my equipment and bring it with me. However, I am now receiving Windows activation errors.

As soon as I got the equipment stood back up and powered up, I was prompted with needing to activate my copy of Windows. This particular copy was from the Windows 7 to Windows 10 upgrade a few years ago.

I go to the Windows Activation screen in settings and I see the following:

We can't activate Windows on this device as our activation servers aren't available right now. Make sure you're connected to the internet and we'll automatically try to activate Windows when the service becomes available. Error code: 0x80072EFD.

I also get an prompted to activate my copy of MS 2016 Office.

I've tried calling and was hoping to speak to a live person, but only get an IVR to which will try to activate over the phone.

I'm not sure why moving my equipment from my residence to a temporary residence will cause this, but that seems to be the issue.

One additional bit of information that I forgot about. At my primary residence, the machine is on a LAN. Here at the temporary residence, its on an unsecured WIFI network, so I am also using a VPN tunnel to help keep myself protected from any prying eyes.

Any thoughts on what is going on?

Thanks

Daryl

I made a change and I thought that it was resolved, however, I now see that this is still an issue, so I removed the "Solved" marking.

Any comments will be appreciated.

Thank you

Daryl

The message was "...our activation servers aren't available right now...". I suspect your use of VPN is somehow not allowing access the the MS activation servers. I wouldn't worry about Windows activation yet, Win10 will continue to work until you get a more permanent residence and can turn off the VPN.

I wonder if its the same bug affecting windows 7 sp1.

Microsoft's killer Windows 7 patch: Breaks networking, flags legit PCs as 'Not genuine' | ZDNet

Hello All.

Thanks for all of the replies. For some reason, this resolved itself.

My thoughts also were the VPN, but for a while, even with the VPN disconnected, I was getting the error. I also suspected the MAC because I went from a hard line to a WIFI. I was just confused why either should matter because everything is authentic and fully licensed. I didn't know that MS continuously checks licenses.

I'm good for now. Hopefully it'll stay this way.

Thanks

Daryl