You have an ASP.NET web application running on a web-farm that does not use sticky sessions - so the requests for a session are not guaranteed to be served the same machine. Occasionally, the users get error message Validation of viewstate MAC failed. What could be one reason that is causing this error?

The most common reason for this error is that the machinekey value in machine.config is different for each server. As a result, viewstate encoded by one machine cannot be decoded by another. To rectify this, edit the machine.config file on each server in the web-farm to have the same value for machinekey.