Office 365 Support Service Level Agreement

A few weeks ago, I saw a nice reminder on Reddit that if a Microsoft 365 service breaks down long enough, customers are entitled to a credit, what they paid for that service or other services concerned. I had completely forgotten — my client is only a few users, so it`s not like the credit was huge for my budget or something huge — but I thought it was a good topic for the blog. Microsoft Teams SLA is documented in microsoft Online Services Level Agreement. The agreement is available to the public through Microsoft here. You should refer to this document as an author and not as my blog. I`m not a lawyer and the agreement is between Microsoft and the client, but here`s a breakdown of the main points. I provided these mathematics and asked for explanations as to why this was not the situation for my tenant. Finally, the Microsoft representative replied that my calculations were correct, and they informed me that I would get the service credits, and provided a list of the amount I would receive as funds for our four accounts. At the end of the day, we get the service credit that I feel we deserve. In order for Microsoft to verify a claim, you must submit the right to customer support from Microsoft Corporation, including all the information needed to validate Microsoft`s request, including, but not only: Most of Microsoft`s online services are linked to a service level contract. And almost all of them are set at level three-nine: a 99.9% guarantee. You can also see references for four-nine and five-nine, although these are almost always advertising actual performance, does not guarantee performance. There are probably dozens of different SLAs in the M365 ecosystem, from Azure Active Directory, Exchange Online to team call quality, different server ecosystems to the Power Platform platform and much more.

What I am saying is before you apply for credit, make sure you understand the ALA of the specific service you are talking about. During a service outage, you will find a service reference in the M365 Administration Centre > Service Health > incidents. Of course, if the administration center is affected, you won`t see anything, which is why I like to follow the @MSFT365Status twitter handles. I have a full article on how you get push notifications if an M365 service breaks down if you`re interested. Now I`m not a lawyer. I don`t write SLAs and I haven`t read them all. And of course, you can say, “Well, it`s your responsibility to be fully aware of all the SLAs that you agree with.” Maybe. What if you inherit a client as a new administrator? What everyone will eventually do. My point here is that directors are not expected to be legal experts, even if they have made the initial agreement, but they are also clients and have the right to complain when a perceived deterioration of service occurs. Note that this is no different for on-premise as mentioned above.

And since chatting with different SharePoint employees, they didn`t know what a service level contract was, and as soon as I explained it, they said all things based on the state of “Why on Earth we don`t look if we can use this for our SharePoint support, at least we could know what`s supported!” We support our commitment to achieving and maintaining service levels for each service. If we do not reach and maintain service levels for each service, as described in the service level agreement, you may be entitled to a credit on a portion of your monthly service charge.