According to a report from a very outraged Ars Technica, the author of the article is still locked out of playing Dragon Age: Origins since April 9, as have other users. This is as a result of BioWare's authentication servers failing. Word from [H]ard-OCP is that the issue was addressed by BioWare and was explained in this thread, in which the developer wrote: "We're continuing to investigate, both here and at EA. We have some theories about what is occurring but no firm fix at this time. We apologize for the inconvenience and request your patience while our engineers continue working towards a solution."

Ars Technica, on the other hand, continues to express its annoyance how authentication problems were present in the game since its launch:

It's not really upsetting me that much that I can't play DA:O on a weekday—that's probably for the better. And I'm not by any means opposed to DRM for games; indeed, there's an argument to be made that it's a legitimate response to ongoing piracy problems. No, my beef is with buggy, poorly-thought-out DRM schemes that have legit users sniffing around torrent sites to see if they can get their hands on a working copy of the game they paid for. The fact that DA:O has to reauthorize my DLC every time I log into the Bioware server is just nuts, and it sets users up for all sorts of problems. (On the client side, the authorization service that runs under Windows doesn't always start, so even if Bioware's servers are up, users can still face this problem.)

Then there's the fact that, again, EA/Bioware didn't address this issue for three whole days. For three days, users were locked out of a game that they paid for due to these server problems, and there was no notice posted. Not only that, but they either don't monitor the Bioware forums, or they don't care enough to participate in them, because no one from Bioware showed up during this period to even acknowledge the issue informally. This mix of incompetence and malicious neglect is startling to me, but it's apparently par for the course for these two companies.

Thanks, Blue.