New Unity user here, stuck on activating a new license

Hi, I'm new to Unity. I understand I'll need to activate a license before moving forward but I seem to have encountered a bug.

I'm at the License Management screen and when I go through the process to activate a new (personal) license, the message "Your license successfully activated" pops up followed shortly by "Machine identification is invalid for current license". All the while the main screen continues to inform me I have no license active.

I then try to do manual activation, uploading and downloading the necessary files as instructed. When I feed the downloaded license file and click "confirm", the message "invalid license file" pops up, with no further info as to what went wrong.

So I'm stuck outside the door now unsure of what to do next... Can anyone know of a solution? Thanks a lot!