Microsoft 365 outage: you may get money off your bill if you use it for work, but you’ll have to ask Microsoft for it, as a server failure takes down Outlook, Teams and Exchange

Microsoft 365 services have been offline for hours at this point, and I am still running into the “Your request can’t be completed right now” error when I open Outlook. At the same time, Copilot isn’t working at all, and Teams still feels slow. If you couldn’t get work done because Microsoft 365 services went down, you might be able to get some money back.

For those unaware, when you buy one of these premium services, whether from Microsoft or any other well-known company, you may also sign up for a service level agreement, also called an SLA, which usually has a “commitment” clause. This allows you to request a credit when a service fails to meet its uptime commitment.

On November 12, Microsoft 365 services experienced a major outage, and it’s still ongoing, with the company telling us it’s seeing some limited recovery. In our tests, we observed that nearly all Microsoft 365 services, including Copilot and popular services like Outlook and Teams, were offline.

Here’s the full list of services that went offline on November 12, according to our tests and user reports:

• Outlook
• Microsoft 365/Office
• Teams
• Copilot
• OneDrive
• Microsoft Store on Windows PCs
• Azure

Microsoft created an incident report, MO1550821, and added that services like Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and Defender XDR are also affected. According to the same report, Microsoft says it’s been having issues since around 1:25 PM ET, but we’ve got credible reasons to believe the outage started much earlier in the day, although it was limited.

“We determined the elevated load isn’t driven by an increase in traffic, but by a number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable; straining the remaining infrastructure,” Microsoft said in a statement.

Microsoft says it’s been trying to reduce the strain on the infrastructure, so it paused deployments, freed up memory, and also started rerouting traffic across its infrastructure.

Of course, the company also rebooted its servers, as one should!

Microsoft 365 has been offline for seven hours. Does that mean you’ll get a 50% credit?

I’ve had the opportunity to claim credits when Google Cloud experienced outages a long time ago, and I’ve had plenty of good experiences with it. If you’ve seen viral posts on the internet suggesting that the seven-hour outage means you’ll automatically qualify for a 50% credit, you’re in for a surprise, as it’s not quite that simple.

According to an older version of Microsoft’s agreement, Exchange Online uptime is calculated using user-minutes. That’s based on the simple fact that a widespread global outage does not mean every single user was affected, so Microsoft considers both how long the service was unavailable and how many users were affected.

Let me explain it using an example. November has 30 days, or 43,200 minutes. If every licensed user continuously experienced qualifying Exchange Online downtime for more than 43.2 minutes during the month, with no scheduled downtime affecting the calculation, the uptime would fall below 99.9%.

Now, if take today’s outage into context, more than seven hours and 12 minutes of qualifying downtime for every user would take it below 99%.

However, this calculation changes when you consider that only some users were affected, or the service worked intermittently. Just because the Microsoft 365 outage lasted seven hours or is still ongoing, it isn’t enough to assume that you’re eligible for a 50% credit for your organization.

But some affected business customers may be eligible for credits, and here’s how to get your money back.

How to request a Microsoft 365 outage credit

If you purchased Microsoft 365 directly from Microsoft, you can open a support request in the Microsoft 365 admin center.

In the support request, explain that you want Microsoft to review an SLA credit for the outage, and include the relevant incident ID, such as EX1550543 for Exchange Online or MO1550821 for the broader Microsoft 365 incident.

Before submitting the request, collect as much information as you can:

• Which services were affected and what users couldn’t do.
• When the problem started and when service was restored for your organization.
• The number and locations of affected users.
• Any relevant screenshots, error messages, support tickets, or troubleshooting steps.

I’ve opened a ticket with Microsoft to claim credit, and here are the steps I followed for my organization with almost a hundred users:

1. Go to https://admin.cloud.microsoft/ (Microsoft 365 admin center).
2. On the admin center home page, click Help & support in the bottom-right corner.
   
3. If the Support Assistant opens, turn off the Support Assistant toggle to open the search box.
   
4. Search for “Request an SLA service credit for a Microsoft 365 outage.”
   
5. Press enter if you don’t see the below screen. Click Contact support, then choose Email.
   
6. In the request title, include “SLA service credit request” and the Issue ID.

Now, you need to fill in all your details and choose Contact me.

If you purchased Microsoft 365 through a reseller or Cloud Solution Provider, you’ll need to contact that provider and ask them to submit or help with the claim. Don’t wait too long, as Microsoft says claims for services other than Azure must be submitted within one month after the end of the billing month in which the incident occurred.

Hours-long outage, and why some of you could be eligible for credits

Just because Microsoft 365 went offline doesn’t mean all customers are eligible for credits. But given the outage has been going on for hours, and the company officially acknowledges it, some of you may qualify depending on how many users were affected in your organization and what services you use.

I checked the November 2026 version of Microsoft’s volume licensing agreement, and I found that the Exchange Online availability terms list three credit levels:

This does not mean you’ll get 25% or 50% off your entire Microsoft 365 bill, as these percentages only apply to the eligible service fees under the agreement.

“Service level agreement (SLA) credits from Microsoft are determined based on which services were affected,” Microsoft noted in a support document for licensing partners. “Credits are prorated based on the service affected and the duration of the outage.”

For example, Microsoft says that if a customer has an Office 365 suite and only SharePoint is affected, the credit is for SharePoint, not the entire plan.

It is worth noting that these business SLA credits don’t automatically apply to personal Outlook.com or Microsoft 365 Personal and Family accounts.