So, Spore Galactic Edition arrived this morning through the post. I quickly unwrapped it, through the disk in the drive and installed it. 17 mins later I can launch it. The first thing it asks you for is the serial code so I entered that and then I am treated to a nice Maxis animation and the Spore main menu appears. I then create an account, wait and then a message appears telling me that Spore is unable to verify my activation code so all online privileges have been removed.
WTF!?!
I try again - same results.
Eventually I give up and give EA a call and guess what - the Spore Servers have fallen over and they should be back up and running in 5 hours time. Way to go EA! What’s more you go onto their support forums and there are a lot of people in the same situation.
Edit:
Just got an email from EA over this:
“Thank you for contacting us here at Electronic Arts Customer Support.
We deeply apologise for the inconvenience that you are currently experiencing with SPORE. It appears that there is an ongoing issue with the accounts server and the registration process for the game. We would like to inform you that we are already investigating this concern and in the process of resolving this issue. For updates with regards this concern, you can visit the SPORE site at http://www.spore.com.
We appreciate your continued patience and understanding in the meantime.”
******* UPDATE **********
The Spore servers are now online 
September 5th, 2008 at 9:29 am
[...] to this Xiotex Studios post, EA customer support has confirmed that Spore’s experiencing technical difficulties on its [...]
September 5th, 2008 at 10:34 am
You gotta be shittin’ me! EA needs to make up for this colossal cluster fuck! On opening day??? Were they so busy patting themselves on the back they knocked over the servers???
September 5th, 2008 at 12:00 pm
[...] of gamers right now. Spore dropped today in a lot of places and the EA authentication servers have crashed under the load. Users can’t activate their game, which means all online aspects are null and [...]
September 5th, 2008 at 1:45 pm
[...] the same problem and I got straight onto EA support lines. You can read about what happened here: Xiotex Studios
July 31st, 2009 at 5:51 am
its now the 31st of july, 2009, and this is the exact same problem I received when i opened by bran new game of spore, used the reg key, and this happened, i googled it twice, got nothing untill i came across a forum, this problem is STILL OCCURING, will post fix if there is one.