Comment by sammy2255

They started it because the drivers people used to use from hardware vendors would routinely blue screen windows, which made MS look like the reason windows would crash. Hardware vendors are notoriously inept at software.

It sounds more like a "driver program" gatekeeper so you are arguing about semantics. I'm not claiming that there is no problem, just that an argument based on the distinction between "hardware" and "driver" is void.

Outside of these unfortunuate situations, a lot of people are quite happy for developers of eg kernel anti cheat to have a difficult time.

We do need to recognise, a long history of "windows always bluescreens" was somewhat reigned in by this policy with a lot of crashes coming down to third party drivers.

I doubt someone manually went and flagged all the accounts as invalid suddenly or whatever and that was their goal. By a bug I mean some kind of automated action that did not produce the expected outcome.

Also because, at least on our side, the account was in an inconsistent state: we were correctly enrolled/validated, but could not access the signing interface.

For something like this, I would generalize a "bug" to encompass both software and human processes. Some decision-maker saw some metrics consistent with spam and enacted a spam-blocking measure. Any decision like this is going to lead to false positives. Maybe they decided "I don't need to confer with anyone", or maybe they did and got the green light even after multiple eyeballs looked at it. I'm not saying that this does any good for Microsoft's already-sullied trust, but mistakes happen and combating spam is a constantly evolving arms race. There's no way any organization is going to get it 100% of the time even after decades of dealing with it.