November 13, 2026
BlogExpect Credits, Not Cash; SLAs Protect Microsoft, Not You
This week’s outage of Microsoft 365 services—centered mostly around a massive Exchange Online outage—will have a lot of customers screaming for checks compensating them for the real costs and hypothetical “lost opportunities” incurred during this extensive outage.
Sadly, almost all of those demands are going to fall on deaf ears. Or at least be redirected to a contract they already signed stating what you can expect in terms of value (it will effectively never be money).
Before I joined Directions in Feb. 2027, most of my experience was in maintaining IT infrastructure and leading operations teams for large organizations. Back in 2006, I was given a piece of wisdom from the technical founder of a co-location facility (remember those?) that my employer was evaluating:
Me: “What’s your service level agreement?”
Him: “We don’t have SLAs. We work to be up all the time. What we do is list out how and when you’re compensated for downtime. That’s the important part of the contract.”
That one stuck with me.
Providers can trumpet “five nines!” from the rooftops, but the important part of the contract isn’t the SLA – it’s the part where they define how a failure of service is measured, the thresholds for compensation, and what form that compensation takes. These contracts will say under what terms you get compensation, how much it is (or isn’t), how it’s provided, what you need to do—exactly—to get it, what is and isn’t included, and even what legal recourse you have (usually binding arbitration).
In other words, the SLA and the terms backing it don’t protect you, the customer. They protect the provider from you. (That’s the way most contracts work, after all.)
When it’s Microsoft, if you think they’re diabolical in their licensing terms just imagine how well their legal and risk management teams went over their Service Level Agreements for Online Services document (in English, the latest version is a hefty 110 pages and 55,090 words). In addition, these documents are supplemented by the Microsoft 365 and Office 365 service descriptions, your organization’s contract with Microsoft (be it an EA or MCA), and several other associated documents.
Microsoft protects itself, and they’re not going to make any extra effort to give you back anything.
Getting (Service) Credit Due
For this outage (or any Microsoft outage), the onus is on you, the customer, to make your claim. And all you’re going to get out of it is service credits on the service that just failed you, not a check.
Microsoft’s thresholds for Exchange Online are as follows, based on uptime for a 30-day month:
| Uptime Percentage | Service Credit |
| < 99.9% | 25% |
| < 99% | 50% |
| < 95% | 100% |
While the formal extent of this recent outage has yet to be measured, it’s firmly in the 50% service credit range. A 12-hour outage is 98.3% uptime, while 24 hours is still 96.6% uptime. And while several other services were impacted by this outage, it remains to be seen if Microsoft will consider them for outages if it was Exchange Online’s outage at fault.
Per Microsoft’s terms, to obtain a service credit, your organization must
“[…] submit the claim to customer support at Microsoft Corporation including all information necessary for Microsoft to validate the claim, including but not limited to: (i) a detailed description of the Incident; (ii) information regarding the time and duration of downtime; (iii) affected resource names; (iv) the number and location(s) of affected users; and v) a description of errors that occurred during the incident. Failure to provide the required information will result in claims being rejected.”
For Microsoft 365 services, Microsoft has to receive your claim by the end of the following month after the outage; you’ll have until the end of December for this one. (Azure claims are a slightly more flexible 60 days after the event.)
Microsoft says it will make “reasonable efforts to process claims promptly following an investigation, typically within forty-five (45) days of receipt of the claim.” Any service credit owed to your applicable service fees will then be applied, according to the company.
So capture your logs and incident documentation and begin working with your internal teams to assemble your claim. A 50% credit of your monthly Microsoft 365 Enterprise subscription costs is still considerable and worth pursuing, even if it’s not the pound of flesh that some within your organization might be yelling for.
Just don’t expect Microsoft to offer that credit without chasing them down.
After all, those service agreements aren’t there to protect you.
