The outage affecting Outlook, Teams and Copilot on 12 November 2026 can earn business customers a credit, but only on request. Microsoft's availability commitment, known in English as the Service Level Agreement or SLA for short, provides for credits of 25, 50 or 100 percent of the fee for the affected service if availability is too low. The claim must reach Microsoft by 31 December 2026.
Dr. Web reported on the evening of 12 November that Outlook and Microsoft 365 had gone down in the USA. Microsoft stated that parts of its infrastructure were under increased load, and at that time named neither the cause nor the duration.
At what outage level do you get money back?
The SLA measures availability per service and calendar month in user minutes: downtime times affected users, relative to all minutes of all users. At a value below 99.9 percent you get 25 percent of the monthly fee for that service, below 99 percent 50 percent, and below 95 percent the entire fee.
When Microsoft pays
Outage per user in a month with 30 days, for Exchange Online and Teams
- 43 minfrom this duration, 25 percent of the monthly fee
- 7.2 hfrom this duration, 50 percent of the monthly fee
- 36 hfrom this duration, the entire monthly fee
Own calculation based on the thresholds of 99.9, 99 and 95 percent, rounded
Source: Microsoft Licensing
According to Microsoft's availability commitment in the version dated 1 November 2026, this tiered scale applies to Exchange Online and Teams. For Exchange Online, an outage is counted when users cannot send or receive emails in Outlook on the web; for Teams, when they cannot chat or start a meeting. A month with 30 days has 43,200 minutes. Mathematically, the thresholds are 43.2 minutes, 7.2 hours and 36 hours of outage per user, provided all users were affected. If only part of the workforce is affected by an outage, the required duration rises accordingly.
Microsoft measures Copilot differently. There, what counts is the share of permissible prompts that go unanswered because of a server error in the language model. The first tier begins at less than 99.5 percent successful responses, the further ones at 99 and 95 percent.
How do you submit the claim?
The credit does not come automatically. Microsoft requires the claim to be submitted to support, with a description of the incident, the start and duration of the outage, the number and location of affected users, and the error messages that occurred. If information is missing, Microsoft rejects the claim. The incident number can be found in the Admin Center in the section for service status, in English "Service health". For Exchange Online it begins with EX.
For purchases through a cloud partner, the partner submits the claim. The help text in the Partner Center requires the tenant ID, the incident number and an email from the domain of the affected tenant for the claim. For partner purchases, it gives a deadline of one month after the end of the billing month. The SLA itself sets 31 December as the last day of receipt for an incident in November.
According to its own statement, Microsoft generally reviews a claim within 45 days. The credit reduces the fee for the affected service and never exceeds its monthly fee. It does not compensate for lost revenue or other damages; according to the SLA, it is the sole remedy. Private subscriptions such as Microsoft 365 Family do not appear in the document.
What this means for you
It is best to secure the evidence right away: save the entries on the incidents in the Admin Center including all updates, and note from when your users could no longer send, receive or chat. A screenshot of the error message with the time supports the claim. According to the SLA, Microsoft's outage notices confirm neither a missed commitment nor an entitlement.
Then roughly calculate whether the effort is worthwhile. An outage under 43 minutes per user does not reach the first threshold. Above that, the claim brings 25 percent of the monthly fee of the affected service, not of the entire subscription. For partner purchases, it is best to write to your partner this week so that they submit the claim before the end of the year.
Dr. Web reported the outage on 12 November 2026; Microsoft's availability commitment is current as of 1 November 2026.
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