Microsoft Tells Customers to File Claims for Exchange Outage Credit

Were your customers affected by the Microsoft Exchange Online outage that occurred two weeks ago? Then they may be eligible for a 25 percent service credit.

Organizations that were affected by the outage in North America in June will have to file individual claims if they wish to collect on the service credit, but they'll have to first navigate Microsoft's (MSFT) service level agreement (SLA) to determine if they're eligible for the credit.

The outage, which last for seven hours, affected many of Microsoft's Exchange Online and Office 365 customers. But Microsoft has been mostly silent about the outage since it occurred on June 24, knocking out email service for some U.S.-based customers in Central and Eastern time zones. It was an significant inconvenience for many organizations, which found they were unable to send or receive email during that time.

And it certainly wouldn't have endeared Microsoft to its customers—or its partners, who surely felt the pressure from customers even though there was nothing they could feasibly do about the outage.

The Exchange Online outage happened a day after Lync suffered a similar outage, taking many customers offline in terms of being able to send messages, make Internet-based calls or engage in videoconferencing activities.

Microsoft took its share of scolding from outraged customers at the time, and many of those will likely be eligible to receive the service credit. To determine eligibility, customers (or their trusted channel partners) will have to run some numbers to find out if their outage time was reduced below 99.9 percent—the minimum uptime amount Microsoft promises in its SLA.

All service credit applications must be submitted by the end of July.