Office 365 hosted customers in Europe are recovering from an outage of about two days. Affected customers should make sure Microsoft gives them the downtime discount they’re entitled to.
The outage affected Office 365 email and other hosting in the UK and parts of Europe, like The Netherlands and Belgium for about two days late last week.
Office 365 Home, Personal, University customers were not troubled. There was a similar outage in the UK back in April 2018.
These outages happen to all the major hosting services. They are incredibly annoying and customers are right to complain.
It again shows how important it is to have a backup plan. There are ways to workaround an Office 365 outage We explained this back in 2017 THREE WAYS YOU MUST PREPARE FOR A MICROSOFT OFFICE 365 EMAIL OUTAGE
Office 365 discount for downtime
Microsoft talks vaguely about a ‘financially backed’ guarantee of 99.9% uptime. The details are buried deep in the Office 365 Service Level Agreement (SLA).
When Microsoft doesn’t maintain 99.9% uptime, customers get a discounted hosting fee for that month.
- Less than < 99.9% uptime get a 25% discount
- Less than < 99% uptime a 50% discount
- Less than < 95% uptime get full refund of that month’s fees
The calculation works on a per-minute downtime basis. A full two day outage over 31 days is about 93.5%.
Customers caught in the latest Office 365 hosting breakdown should be getting a 50% or 100% discount.
Check your Office 365 billing to make sure Microsoft doesn’t ‘forget’.
