Yes. Disclosure: I work at Microsoft. But I also am the volunteer IT guy at a nonprofit, and am speaking entirely in that context.

I was quite unhappy to get a mail back in (checks archives) January that our grant would be discontinued and we’d either have to make do with the web versions of things, migrate someplace, or start paying. They also reminded us several more times before the drop date. I don’t really understand why Microsoft chose to discontinue the nonprofit grants, and it put a little egg on my face after I had recommended it to our board — but they definitely notified us of the change and what it would mean.

We’ve opted to pay for now; it’s $3/user/month for the SKU that gets full desktop versions of Office, Teams, etc. so not really breaking the bank compared to all the other things we have to pay for.

A non-profit I help out sometimes, was affected, and I have to say the emails were not that clear. Because it's hard to figure out what is part of a license, the free tier etc. I let it lapse, because we migrated of Office, but apparently the license also applied to Intune.

Fine, so I bought licenses but apparently Microsoft deletes "some" of the data. All groups were still there, users and the device ids.. but not the devices themselves. I could see all devices associated to a user but couldn't recreate or restore them in device management. Thus, I had to re-enroll multiple devices. Will migrate off Intune in the future, since it's garbage but haven't found a good alternative for Android devices yet.

If 150,000+ organisations were caught by surprise, I would say it’s clear whatever communication they had was not adequate.

Organisations that didn’t have an off-boarding option (do nothing, pay the minimum, I’ll deal with it) selected should receive monthly reminders, then every 2 weeks (to multiple people), and one per week until a VERY alarming one the week before. And, of course, have all systems shut down and the data archived for a grace period.

I hope they sue Microsoft for what seems neglect.

I think we should take the headline claim that "over 170k nonprofits lost all their data" with a huge grain of salt.

As far as I can tell, the only source for that claim is:

> And he later learned he wasn’t alone, when another company service representative called the very next day and told him that roughly 171,000 small nongovernmental organizations “lost everything” in their OneDrive accounts.

So a second hand account of remarks said over the phone by a low level employee/contractor.

That's an interesting data point to follow up on, but using a single indirectly relayed statement to make such a substantial claim doesn't seem consistent with journalistic standards.

Let’s say our grain of salt lowers that number by 80%. That’s still more than 20,000 non-profits losing all their data.

That’s still a pretty ridiculous number.

Sounds like they’re struggling for cash flow if they’re doing stupid shit like this

Does that mean it is 170000 * 10 * 3 = 5,100,000 per month (assuming 10 users per org)? Isn’t that less than found in the cushion level money for a trillion dollar company?

The same company that puts ads to their weather app on their desktop OS you mean?

Or managed to turn the good old notepad into a CVE 8 vulnerability?

Kidding aside, some bean counter somewhere thought that’s $5M revenue lost, instead of helping the community they’re supposedly a part of.

The second paragraph of the email:

We strongly advise transitioning your users to a different Microsoft 365 offer for nonprofits, before the subscription is cancelled, to avoid disruption and data loss. Connect now with your current Microsoft partner – or find a partner – to get started. Learn more about what happens to your data and access when your subscription ends.

That last sentence links to https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/commerce/sub...

I wish they’d just use clear and blunt language, rather than “strongly advise” and “to avoid.” I’m reminded of my bank sending “Important account information” mail that contains advertising OR actual important information, but at like a 20:1 ratio.

“YOUR FILES WILL BE DELETED ON {DATE}” seems like it would have solved any ambiguity.

More important than that is you have a date where you lock the data, and a date where you actually delete it, and those dates are months apart. Even if the emails are going into a black hole that shouldn't result in data loss. Don't have everything working as usual one day and gone forever the next.

To be fair I get “YOUR FILES WILL BE DELETED ON {DATE}” spam for every fay of the year, I would not be surprised legit emails are getting blocked if they contain that phrase in title - and having it in the body doesn't help either with the amount of "Important update to our terms of service" emails.

Yeah the subject of the email should be "Action Required To Prevent Data Loss" or something

I would almost certainly delete that as spam, since I receive approximately 34987349873964 emails per minute with that exact subject, all of which are intended to do me harm

That's some real nightmarishly passive-aggressive wording. It reads to me like the kind of thing intentionally structured to leave people confused until after the deletions are already done, so then it's too late to argue about the free service being removed.

> What happened to Khosla was just one instance of a crisis that has rocked small nonprofit owners across the globe, who allege that Microsoft failed to communicate with them in a substantive manner about the license cancellations and left them unable to prepare their organizations for the future. As they’ve related online, these already resource-strapped nonprofits have lost troves of data, are struggling to continue their operations, and have been left unable to make up the technology gaps with alternative services. People who run service orgs with low budgets and benefited for years from Microsoft’s programs no longer have much of the technology they need to keep things going—for either the short or long term.

This quote contains linked sources but I can't see them since they're largely on Reddit and Facebook. The Microsoft ones suggest people were blindsided by this cancellation, and that the official support channels in Microsoft are broken. It seems like everyone who was blindsided also tried to submit an official support ticket and was unable to, which is in line with my experience interacting with Microsoft.

> the official support channels in Microsoft are broken

I can say, from first hand experience, the very best cloud providers have support channels that are, at the very least, unpleasant to use.

Apple is decent. The internal processes are opaque, but you can always pretty easily talk to a real person who can and will escalate things to real internal support teams as soon as the CSR scripts no longer apply.

Apple has always been brilliant, but they don’t offer a full spectrum of cloud services.

Yes, but its seems Microsoft is the most broken.

The article cites two people who say they didn't receive fair warning, and one who acted on it to renew their subscription to avoid the data loss who lost everything anyway, so seemingly: no.