Microsoft outage compensation: who gets credit and how to claim it

Only customers with a business relationship with Microsoft have a contractual right to compensation. That covers Microsoft 365 Business plans, email hosted on Exchange Online and paid Teams tiers such as Teams Premium, even if your business is a one-person shop. Those subscriptions sit under Microsoft’s Service Level Agreement for Online Services, a long document that promises a set level of uptime and spells out what happens when Microsoft misses it.

Consumers are a different story. Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscribers, along with free Outlook.com and Hotmail users, are covered by the Microsoft Services Agreement instead. That agreement makes no uptime promise and doesn’t mention an SLA at all. It says refunds or credits are handed out at Microsoft’s “sole discretion.”

So a home user can still contact Microsoft and ask. Just keep expectations low. There’s no rule that says you’re owed anything, however long your inbox was dark.

For Exchange Online, Microsoft’s target is 99.9 percent uptime across a billing month. If it falls short, business customers earn a service credit, which is money taken off a future bill rather than cash back. As the published SLA sets them out, the credit climbs in steps as uptime gets worse, starting at a quarter of the month’s fee, then rising to half, and reaching the whole fee once uptime sinks below ninety-five percent.

Microsoft counts downtime in what it calls user-minutes. In plain terms, it multiplies how long each incident lasted by how many of your users it hit, then compares that with all the minutes in your billing cycle, which is usually 30 days. For Exchange, downtime simply means your people couldn’t send or receive mail in Outlook on the web.

Here’s how that plays out. If the outage knocked your email out for about 18 hours, your uptime for a 30-day cycle works out to 97.5 percent, a downtime figure of 2.5 percent. That lands you in the tier for a credit worth half your monthly fee.

One technology writer who pays for Exchange Online and Microsoft 365 Business Standard ran the numbers on their own account: a $24.88 bill means $12.44 back. Firms with more seats stand to recover far more. Your exact figure depends on which products you pay for, because the SLA sets terms product by product, and on how long the outage really hit your users.

You claim by contacting Microsoft support from the Microsoft 365 admin center, and you have to do it separately for each incident. The SLA says Microsoft will only consider a claim that carries enough detail to check it. Here’s a practical route:

1. Work out what you paid. In the admin center, open Billing, then Bills & payments, and note the monthly cost of each subscription the outage touched.
2. Collect the details Microsoft wants. List the affected resources, how many users were hit and where they work, when the downtime began and how long it ran, a short account of what happened, and any error messages your staff saw.
3. Quote the incident IDs. Microsoft tracked the Exchange Online problem as EX1550543 and the wider Microsoft 365 incident as MO1550821. A separate Teams messaging disruption earlier that day was TM1550488. Include whichever ones hit your business.
4. Open a support request. The headset icon sits at the bottom right of the admin center, not in the left menu. It opens help and an AI chat first, so tap the headset icon at the top of that page to reach the contact options, choose email and fill in the form.
5. Save the case number. A quick reply with a tracking ID should arrive, so you can chase the claim later.

Under the SLA as reported, claims are due by the end of the month after the outage. For this incident, that means the last day of December. Since nothing happens automatically, a business that never files simply gets nothing, so keep screenshots and incident notes while they’re fresh.

Microsoft blames a networking mistake, not hackers. A company spokesperson said the problem was introduced during an earlier network capacity upgrade and only came to the surface after a more recent network change. Microsoft said it had nothing to do with a cyberattack or with AI agents.

The trouble began around midday Eastern time on Thursday, November 12. Microsoft first suspected heavy load. It then found traffic hadn’t grown at all: a batch of servers had dropped out unexpectedly, leaving the rest straining. On those machines, a process that sets up secure connections got overwhelmed, so they stopped answering requests. Engineers paused deployments, restarted servers, moved traffic onto other routes and rolled back a recent configuration change.

To avoid losing mail, Microsoft stretched its email timeout window to 48 hours so messages sent during the outage could still arrive. That’s why many inboxes filled with old messages as service returned. The fallout reached the US House of Representatives, the Japanese government and Australian police, plus AI firms including OpenAI and Anthropic. Microsoft has promised a full post-incident report on the root cause once its review is done.

The most likely “outage refund” to hit your inbox this week is a scam. Fake messages promise money back for the hours Outlook was down, offer priority support, or claim your account must be verified urgently because of the outage. They’re after your Microsoft password, your card details or other personal data.

Genuine business credits only come through a claim your admin files in the admin center. Microsoft says it doesn’t reach out with unsolicited tech support offers, and its real error messages never ask you to phone a number for an urgent repair. A few habits keep you safe:

• Skip the links and attachments in any outage “refund” or “recovery” email, and type Microsoft’s address into your browser yourself.
• Never give remote access, passwords, verification codes or payment details to a caller who says they’re a Microsoft engineer.
• If you already entered your password on a suspicious page, change it through your real Microsoft account, change it anywhere you reused it, and switch on multifactor sign-in.
• If you shared card or bank details, call your bank and ask it to watch for strange charges.

In the US, you can report these scams to the Federal Trade Commission through its fraud reporting site, and Microsoft runs its own scam reporting page too.