I have now seen this problem many times over. As I run 9 PCs I sample lot of experience with products....
This seems to happen often with Norton Utilites 15 Version 15.0.0.122 in my case).
You run the smart update and you get a message saying something like "There is a problem with your subscription please contact support" and then next time you start the application it asks you to activate it.
And then you start a road of pain as if you are lucky it activates. If not it does not and you start with chatting with a support rep and several tries etc... eventually it activates. Also it may or may not activate if you try later.
Overall it seems quite prone to disactivations (sometimes just by itself as I run a weekly scheduled check an repair see this sometimes that it disactivated itself and wants you to activate it again) and re-activation is iffy.
Hope that Symantec can fix this problem as running this utility on several computers and having this constant annoyance is well annoying.