Businesses hit by the Microsoft 365 outage can ask for a credit on their next bill, but Microsoft will not issue one on its own, and individual workers cannot claim anything.
Outlook and Teams were functionally offline for many users on Thursday and into Friday, and the disruption appeared to be receding by Friday morning. Microsoft's service-level agreement (SLA), the contract section covering outages, promises 99.9 percent uptime each month for each product in the suite, such as OneDrive and Outlook. A service that falls below that line makes a business eligible to claim.
Eligible does not mean paid. Microsoft counts downtime in "user minutes": the time a service was down multiplied by the number of users demonstrably affected. Credits are prorated, so a small shortfall might earn only a 25 or 50 percent credit. They are also calculated per service. If only Outlook failed, the credit applies to Outlook, not to the whole bundle.
The process depends on how a company bought the software. Direct customers file through the Office admin center and must supply incident IDs and specific descriptions of how long users lost service. Microsoft then runs its own calculation. Companies that bought through a Cloud Solution Provider partner or another reseller must ask that provider to file for them, and the pace of that depends on the provider. The claim deadline is the end of December.
The 99.9 percent figure works out to roughly 43 minutes of allowed downtime in a 30-day month, so an outage running from Thursday into Friday should clear that bar for the services it hit. The per-service, user-minute counting then decides how much the credit is worth.
The larger point is what a credit measures. It discounts the subscription fee. It does not reimburse the cost of stalled email, missed meetings or idle staff, and the distance between those two numbers is the part no claim form addresses.