Microsoft’s massive, productivity-destroying software outage appears to be receding as of Friday morning, but that’s only the start of the process for businesses looking to get some of their Office 365 money back.
Several important enterprise software products, such as Outlook and Teams, were functionally offline for many users on Thursday and into Friday. Since Office 365 is a service businesses have to pay for, it raises the question: Can those businesses receive some form of compensation from Microsoft for the time lost?
The answer to that question is nuanced. Let’s get into it.
Does Microsoft owe me money?
According to helpful resources like these explainers from Quartz and Office Watch, the short answer is no; Microsoft does not owe anyone money as a result of this outage. But that doesn’t mean the company doesn’t owe any compensation, as it offers credits (essentially a reduction on the next bill) in the event of an outage.
One important thing to note: You have to request a credit. Microsoft doesn’t offer them automatically.
Purchasing Microsoft’s software suite involves a service-level agreement (SLA). This SLA includes provisions related to outages and compensation. In this case, Microsoft’s SLA promises 99.9 percent uptime each month for each piece of software in the suite, such as OneDrive and Outlook. If any of those services fall below the 99.9 percent threshold, it’s possible to claim a credit.
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“Possible” is the key word here, though, as both Quartz and Office Watch make it very clear that Microsoft is extremely strict about how it calculates downtime in these instances. The actual math is too complicated to fully get into here, but Microsoft counts downtime in terms of “user minutes,” or the amount of time the services were down multiplied by the number of users demonstrably affected.
Credits are also prorated depending on how much uptime was lost, so a small amount of downtime might only be worth a 25 or 50 percent credit. Where this gets even more complicated is that Microsoft calculates credits according to each individual service, not the entire software bundle. If you only lost service time in Outlook, but other parts of the Office 365 suite worked, you’d only get a small credit for Outlook.
All of this is to say that, depending on the size of the affected business and the amount of downtime it experienced, one of these credits could be worth only a few measly dollars.
Who can make a claim?
To be very clear, individual workers who lost service time due to the big outage cannot file a claim or receive compensation. Businesses who license this software from Microsoft can do it, but even that is more complicated than you’d think.
Businesses only have until the end of December to file these claims, for starters. If a business purchased Microsoft software directly from Microsoft, it can go to the Office admin center to file a claim. They will need to provide a lot of information, such as incident IDs and specific descriptions of how long service was unavailable to users. From there, Microsoft will perform its own calculations to determine whether the business receives a credit.
Many businesses do not purchase these Microsoft products directly from the company, instead obtaining them through Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) partners or other indirect resellers. In that case, the business will have to bug the provider to submit a claim on their behalf. Depending on the provider, that may or may not happen in a timely or productive manner.
Given the number of hoops that businesses have to jump through to get one of these credits, one could argue it’s not worth the hassle, depending on the size of a business and how much time it lost.
