Yeah I have a thread on this elsewhere and in this particular section there's a thread about it as well. I'm amazed that you were able to instantly connect after reactivating, maybe you were lucky and they overlooked your inactive status during the merge, I have no idea. As for your friend though, he's in the same boat as my girlfriend, it's day 4 and she still can't connect, and the Reps. won't shed any light on anything about it. The best we can hope for is that they finish the data transfers soon, and also keep in mind that the month your friend payed for is ticking away as we speak, so the more time he's locked out of the servers, the more money he's wasting thanks to SE's screw ups. Hopefully there will be compensation in order.

The only reason I think they aren't announcing whether or not there will be compensation (i.e. a month free for users who couldn't log on for the duration of this nonsense) is because if they announced something like that now before the problem was resolved, then there would be an influx of people who haven't been merged; reactivating their accounts in an attempt to exploit whatever it is they are giving to compensate for the time lost. That's merely an assumption though, it could also be that they just have no idea wtf they are doing (more then likely the case).

In any event, tell your friend to wait a bit longer, if "several days" doesn't include weekends and only business days, then there's a chance they'll get to his account tomorrow morning, since the weekend is over now.