Office 365 Outage: Microsoft Credits Only for Businesses That Ask

Microsoft’s Office 365 apps, including Outlook and Teams, were effectively unusable for many users on Thursday and into Friday, Mashable reported, and the outage appeared to be easing by Friday morning. Microsoft has not disclosed the cause in the coverage so far.

The disruption has left businesses that pay for Office 365 asking whether they can get money back. According to Mashable, Microsoft does not owe cash refunds, but paying customers can ask for service credits, which lower a future bill. Credits are not applied automatically.

Does Microsoft owe Office 365 customers a refund for the outage?

No. Mashable, citing explainers from Quartz and Office Watch, said the company owes no money for the downtime. What it does have is a service-level agreement (SLA), the contract that comes with an Office 365 purchase and sets out what happens when services go down.

Under that agreement, Microsoft promises 99.9 percent uptime each month for every individual service in the suite, such as Outlook and OneDrive. When a service falls below that level, the customer may be able to claim a credit.

How does Microsoft calculate a credit?

Quartz and Office Watch both describe the company as very strict about how it counts downtime, according to Mashable. Microsoft measures lost service in “user minutes”: the length of the outage multiplied by the number of users it can show were affected.

Credits are prorated by how much uptime was lost, so a short outage might qualify for only a 25 or 50 percent credit. Each service is also calculated on its own rather than as part of the whole bundle. A company that lost Outlook while other apps kept working would get a credit for Outlook alone. Mashable said that for some businesses the result could be just a few dollars.

Who can file a claim?

Only the business that holds the license. Individual employees who could not work during the outage cannot file a claim or receive anything, Mashable reported.

How a business files depends on where it bought the software:

• Companies that bought directly from Microsoft file through the Office admin center.
• Companies that bought through a Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) partner or another reseller have to ask that provider to submit the claim for them.

Mashable noted that resellers vary in how quickly and how well they handle these requests.

What does a claim require?

Businesses must supply detailed records, including incident IDs and a description of how long each service was unavailable to their users. Microsoft then runs its own calculation and decides whether a credit is owed.

What this means for businesses hit by the outage

The window is short. Mashable reported that businesses have until the end of December to file. Given the paperwork and the per-service math, the outlet said some smaller companies may decide the effort is not worth the small credit they would receive, while larger organizations with longer downtime have more at stake.

For individual Outlook and Teams users, there is no claim to make. Any credit goes to the employer or organization that pays for the license.

Source: Mashable