Outlook Went Down? Microsoft May Owe You Money

Rest assured this week that while Outlook, Teams, and other Microsoft services were flatlining, the company’s billing operations were still firing on all cylinders. Copilot can’t run on air alone, after all. It needs cash.

The silver lining to the week is that, in the light of our global recovery from one of the most debilitating tech outages in recent memory, Microsoft now owes you compensation. And depending on the size of your operation and the degree to which you rely on Microsoft products, the payout could be substantial.

If you have a business relationship with Microsoft—a subscription to a Microsoft 365 Business plan, email hosted on Microsoft Exchange, or perhaps a Teams Premium tier—that relationship is governed by reams of documentation, among them being a Service Level Agreement.

Service Level Agreements, or SLAs, are old hat to large enterprises who use them to hold accountable service providers like web hosts and email services, ensuring they stay online and operational—and they are often in the realm of demanding 99.99 percent reliability or higher, as is the default promise with Microsoft Azure. If a provider fails to hit the promised availability level, the customer is due a refund (or credit towards next month’s bill, at least).

But SLAs don’t only apply to the Fortune 500. If you have a business account with Microsoft, no matter how small it is, your service is also governed by these promises. And now, Microsoft owes you compensation.

“Business account” is the key phrase in the above, mind you. If you have a Microsoft 365 Family plan or any other individual or personal plan, you are basically out of luck. Outlook could go offline for a month, and you wouldn’t be entitled to anything aside from a series of pointed Facebook posts.

The consumer Microsoft Services Agreement states that individual users can get refunds or credits at Microsoft’s “sole discretion,” but it doesn’t even mention SLAs and promises nothing in the way of uptime. In other words, if your email system wasn’t working for you on November 12, you can ask for money back, but your odds of receiving anything are low.

The Fine Print Is in Your Favor for Once

Business users are in a much more advantageous position, though Microsoft doesn’t exactly go out of its way to guide you through the refund process. SLA refunds are not automatic. You have to request them for each incident, and the process is hardly straightforward.

To figure out what you’re owed, start by taking a look at the SLA for Microsoft’s Online Services. (This is different than the above consumer Microsoft Services Agreement.) It’s more than 53,000 words long, and quite repetitive, but I’ll digest the important facts for you here.

While many of the promised service levels are identical, start by double-checking the specific Microsoft products you use, as the SLA is broken down by product. A search for “Exchange Online” reveals everything you need to know, in surprisingly plain English.

Downtime is defined as “Any period of time when users are unable to send or receive email with Outlook Web Access.”

Uptime Percentage is calculated by a simple formula: Subtract the minutes of downtime from your total User Minutes, then divide the result by your total User Minutes. Take that result and multiply it by 100.

“Downtime is measured in user-minutes; that is, for each Applicable Period, Downtime is the sum of the length (in minutes) of each Incident that occurs during that Applicable Period multiplied by the number of users impacted by that Incident.”

User Minutes is the total number of minutes in the billing cycle; typically 30 days.

If the calculated Uptime Percentage falls below 99.9 percent, you are entitled to credit (not a cash refund) under the following terms:

Uptime PercentageService Credit< 99.9%25%< 99.5%50%< 95%100%

If we assume the outage lasted about 18 hours for you, that equates to a 2.5 percent Downtime Percentage or a 97.5 percent Uptime Percentage for a 30-day billing cycle. And that puts you squarely in 50 percent Service Credit territory.

How to File for Compensation

While Microsoft is transparent about what you are owed, it has less to say about what you have to do to receive it.

The SLA simply states that “In order for Microsoft to consider a claim, you must submit the claim to customer support at Microsoft Corporation including all information necessary for Microsoft to validate the claim.” You are also directed to supply the following:

(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.

That’s a lot of information, but Microsoft likely does not need much in the way of (i) , (ii), or (v) to validate this global incident. You will need to supply the name or your “affected resource” and how many users were impacted. For the sake of completeness, include in your message the codes for outages for Exchange (EX1550543), Outlook (MO1550821), and Teams (TM1550488) as relevant to your business.

I also did the math on what my various Microsoft subscriptions cost. I only have two, Exchange Online and Microsoft 365 Business Standard, both of which were impacted by the outage. Total price of my last bill: $24.88. Thus, total credit due: $12.44. That may barely be beer money for me, but a company of 100 people will likely be owed over $1,000. If you don’t have these numbers handy, you’ll find them under Billing > Bills & Payments in the Microsoft 365 Admin Center.

With that information collected, then what? Microsoft simply directs you to file a claim with customer service, so that’s exactly what I did. In the same Admin Center, the method to file an email service request is a little tricky. It’s not in the left-hand navigation but rather can be found on the bottom right of the screen. Click the headset icon which expands to reveal “Help & support.” This will default you to Microsoft’s AI chatbot. Within this page, click the headset icon at the top of the screen, which will take you to a “Contact support” page. Choose Email from this screen, and fill in the form with the information you’ve collected.

Your submission should garner a quick response that includes a case number tracking ID. I filed for compensation on Friday and haven’t received any other response yet than a confirmation of receipt, but considering that 12 principal-filled dollars are on the line, you can bet I’ll be tracking it closely.

As a final note: Be aware that claims must be submitted by the end of the month following the outage. So you have until December 31, 2026 to file your claim for the November 12 incident.

I reached out to Microsoft for comment on this story and a PR rep said she would “let me know if the company has anything to share” while offering the same statement you have probably seen too many times already: “We are deeply sorry for the disruption this incident has caused our customers and partners. We know the trust they place in our services and take that responsibility extremely seriously.”

Now we’ll see how seriously it takes the refund process.