Microsoft outage compensation: what customers will get back

The global Microsoft outage, which began on Thursday, 12 November and lasted more than 24 hours, has left customers with an uncomfortable question about money. Compensation is available, but only as a credit toward the cost of the service itself, not as reimbursement for actual losses. The company announced full restoration of services on Saturday, 14 November.

What customers are entitled to

One affected user has already filed a claim and received confirmation that it was accepted; they are now waiting for the result. Other business customers have the same option: in its contracts, Microsoft commits to a certain availability of paid services, and if that promise is not kept, part of the fee is returned as a credit under set conditions.

A simple example shows the difference between compensation and real loss best. Suppose a company pays one thousand crowns a month for an affected service, and for one full day it did not work for any of its users. If there were no other outages during the thirty-day month, availability comes to roughly 96.67 percent. Under the published terms for the Exchange Online email service, that corresponds to a credit of half the monthly fee, or 500 crowns.

The time and deals the company lost are not part of the calculation: Microsoft's terms state that credits do not replace lost revenue, operating costs or indirect losses. The published service level agreement (SLA) for Exchange Online provides for a 25 percent credit when monthly availability falls below 99.9 percent, half the fee when it falls below 99 percent, and the entire monthly fee when it falls below 95 percent. What decides the outcome is the specific contract and the actual impact on users, not just the length of the global incident. The credit is applied against payments for the service; no money will be transferred automatically to a bank account.

Lost hours cannot be repaid with a credit

That very weakness was pointed out by a professional body, the Australian Computer Society (ACS). According to its chief executive Prins Ralston, possible credits will not make up for a small business's lost morning of trading. The organisation did not simply wait for a fix: it called for a review of how dependent Australian institutions are on individual technology providers, demands better communication during such incidents, and wants to assess whether contracts give customers sufficient protection when services fail.

The shutdown was not complete everywhere: in some places work continued, only more slowly and with a backup solution. That was the case at Euronext, the operator of major European exchanges. When some of its teams could not receive email, it asked the companies whose shares trade on its markets to handle urgent matters by phone. According to the news agency, this included, among other things, trading suspensions or notifications of significant shareholdings on the Oslo exchange. Trading itself, the company said, went on as normal, but it generated more phone calls. Euronext assured that it has enough capacity to handle the increased workload and the measures for verifying callers' identity.

How to claim compensation

Customers who want to claim contractual compensation need to do more than wait. They must confirm to support when and for how long the services were down, whom the problems affected and which errors appeared. A general outage notice is not enough to establish a right under the SLA. For November claims, the published terms set a deadline of 31 December. Always check your own contract; free services are not covered by this scheme.

Microsoft apologised for the outage and promised a detailed report. By its explanation, a change in the network exposed a bug introduced during an earlier capacity expansion. The company said it was neither a cyberattack nor the work of AI. Customers could file compensation claims even while the outage was still under way. How much the whole outage cost has not yet been reliably calculated.

The Microsoft outage in brief

When: the outage began on Thursday, 12 November, and full restoration was announced on Saturday, 14 November; the problems lasted more than 24 hours.

Scale: reports came from 74 countries and territories, including Czechia. It was not a complete failure of all services for all users.

Affected services: primarily Exchange Online email and Outlook, as well as some related features of Teams, Copilot and other Microsoft 365 tools.

Impact in Czechia: the Ministry of Finance and Prague airport reported problems; the unavailability of school email was confirmed at one Prague grammar school.

Impact worldwide: the outage disrupted communication at agencies, schools, medical institutions and companies; Euronext moved companies to phone communication, and exchange trading continued.

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Around Prague, based on reporting by novinky.cz