This is wrong on so many levels. First of all, IT admins receive weekly e-mails from AWS, Google and MS that a certain service will shut down and that it will affect operations. In 90% of the cases, these e-mails are sent to all customers instead of only the affected customers, so admins get alarm fatigue.
Secondly, instead of doing a rug pull, what's wrong with a 2-month brownout period? Only allow the admin to login, put OneDrive in read-only mode. That will alert all users clearly.
Thirdly instead of fending of the questions from slate.com with Orwellian corporate speak, they should acknowledge their mistake and spend a couple of weeks of the highly paid engineers to see whether they can recover the data. Why is it always so hard for MS to say "Sorry, we made a mistake".
> Why is it always so hard for MS to say "Sorry, we made a mistake".
Seems like no corpos ever want to say that. Surely it’s not because of some pride or PR? I’m guessing such an admission might also sometimes have legal risks?
Saying sorry means admitting guilt.
If there’s guilt there some level of harm.
If there’s harm you can be sued.
Avoiding being sued due to causing harm usually means increased costs, because you now need to take care you didn’t take before.
Higher cost means you’re less competitive.
Being less competitive makes you less attractive investment target.
So as always it’s all about money.
Saying sorry == lower share price.
Yep, this is the sort of thing happens when you've deeply internalized that trustworthiness and continuity is not important. Microsoft today is not a serious company, it is not run by serious people, and it is at the forefront of a deeply unserious industry.
In this context it would presumably mean not casually deleting your customers' data.
When people say a company is unserious they almost always mean that they're not thinking about, and taking seriously, the work that their customers do. This seems like a classic example of that.
Not the person you’re responding to, but I’d say serious here means committed to delivering value for customers, willing to take lower profits in the short term to be steadfast and reliable, deeply introspective about process (with transparent communication).
Just, you know, taking business seriously. Like they did even 6 or 8 years ago.
The core business now is execs ego-stroking each other and hoping disaster strikes after they cash out.
When Satya came in there was a dramatic shift in culture, and things were improving. I won’t argue they were super-serious, but at least getting better, and focusing on the business rather than the internal strife that Balmer loved to much.
But now… just the opposite. This IS a deeply unserious business. The tech bros got the keys to the combine and have no idea WTF to do, so it’s all cosplay.
producing an os with a focus on utility to end user would be a start. Even just something that makes some form of effort to give users a return on investment on their hardware. Right now, you unluck massive headroom, battery life, and stability, on a laptop by simple putting linux on it. All that despite windows enjoying better all around driver support from manufacturers.
A serious company would never have allowed its core product to turn into the clown show it currently is, yet here we are, a massive corporation pushes an OS that feels vibe coded, and is largly propped up by what little residual community goodwill/ignorance exsists.
Azure is Microsoft's attempt to get into the market that Amazon dominates with AWS. Microsoft traditionally was a software company. Microsoft today is a desperate company trying to make money and stay relevant in a world fed up with the bull crap that they have been peddling over the years. Windows could have been so much more and better, but it's now a sold out clown show, just like XBox, just like Office, just like every other thing they have ever made. In the 35+ years I have been around Microsoft products, I have never seen a product where they didn't over promise and under deliver. Frankly, that is their MO: Over promise, under deliver, and move on the moment they have squeezed every dime they can out of a product. They are not an honest company, they never have been.
IMO it all started going downhill for Microslop with Windows Product Activation in Windows XP. That was the first shot across the bow and sign they were going to be user-hostile.
Selling backup for data that is stored in the cloud (whether selling solution as a provider or selling any solution (even free one) internally to your team), is one of the hardest things in the world.
Microsoft is serious because the world is full of people with needs who do not know better and Microsoft is still the default to serve those needs.
Something does not have to be useful, benign, consistent, worthwhile, or deserving to exist in order to be serious.
For example: Losing an arm and an eye to a fireworks accident, being grievously assaulted in an alley, or having Microsoft arbitrarily delete all your data, are all very serious things. So, I think it is fair to say Microsoft can still be called serious.
I really highly doubt that. The way Microsoft uses the “for business” branding is not in an IRS/legal way to distinguish between for-profit vs nonprofit entities. Rather more like “Discord vs Slack” or “a subreddit vs zendesk” type offering.
“For Organizations” would really have been a more appropriate branding. Governments around the world, including the US government, used plenty of “For Business” software from Microsoft. However, the “for business” branding tells you where the money came from.
So a nonprofit would almost certainly be on a “for business” subscription type. That is to distinguish it from a “for students”, “for home”, or the default “for one person” subscription type.
Never keep your data and your backups in the same place. That’s true for in-office servers, data-centres and cloud. If you must use cloud, use two different providers for your own services and backups.
Also, have a disaster recovery plan ready, and exercise it regularly.
It really can't be understated how many non-profits operate on a shoestring budget and over-extend that few staff they can afford as a standard operating procedure, and have very low technical skill among everyone as they're mission-focused with what little resources they have.
I've worked with and for a couple non-profits where IT help was someone's spouse or kid or brother willing to help out. Often I've been the spouse. Often a shared Google drive filled with poorly managed PII is the solution that works well enough...until something bad happens.
I know. I would expect a very hands-off backup process (for files it’d work better - it’s easy to set up file backups from a OneDrive to a cloud backup service), and, if the recovery is easy and obvious enough, the need to exercise it falls by a lot.
$500 also buys you 20+TB of local storage. It’s not cheap, and many non-profits might struggle with that, but it’s also a way to ensure that even if the world ends, the data is somewhere.
Maybe I am in echo chamber, but none I know exercised recovery plan… ;) except of power plants and othe critical infrastructures, and maybe large enterprises. Others imho use 3–2-1 approach but haven’t tried to recover data.
I am happy to say I have a different experience, but I’m in a different echo chamber, and have been in very regulated spaces where DORA is unforgiving. Ideally, for a non-profit, you want a hands-off process as much as you can. If you need to, backup to whatever your cloud provider has for S3 buckets, on a different account.
As a society we actually generate a lots of books. Future generations wouldn’t be missing too much without the internet I think. Also, not everything is worth preserving. Easily 90% of Reddit is complete garbage
I abandoned Microsoft Outlook Express many years ago after discovering that it kept the files in hidden directories, and were in some scrambled, undocumented format. There was no backup mechanism for it.
> On Reddit, and across Microsoft’s own Tech Community forums, more such claims abound of surprise deletion without notification.
I clicked the link with text “more such claims”, and it appears to be someone complaining about being unable to reach a human after their devices were physically stolen. Not sure how that’s related to the claims in the article.
Meanwhile, other AI firms are thirsty for data - Microsoft could have just slipped in a terms of service change to allow training (it’s sort of in there already), and presto, exabytes of data to train on, with full metadata so you even know if it’s pre-2022.
considering that most non-profits barely have any data, i dont know what MS' incentive is, in not holding on to the data... it definitely must be in the TBs
Did Microsoft give fair warning of what was going to happen to the data in the cloud that was stored there under these licenses? (I don't have a Slate account so I can't read the full article to see if this is addressed.)
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 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The big problem with shifting users from Windows is training. Corporations aren't going to pay to train their employees in something new if they don't absolutely have to. With that said, now that Windows workstation prices going crazy because of RAM/storage/GPU inflation, I hope that we see a shift to more memory efficient operating systems (anything based on UNIX like Linux and MacOS) but need 2x-8x memory (along with fast storage) to have a similar experience running Windows 11.
Sure, but there's a difference between losing the website hosting your bottomless mimosa brunch school reunion, and a non-profit organisations losing all their shared files after taking up an offer of a no-cost a license from MSFT to support their mission. The nature of the "thing" matters IMO.
Depends on what information was given at the moment of "handout." I cannot remember reading anywhere that your data would be deleted when you opened a free account. Data and storage limits, that was it.
This is no accident. Microsoft knew exactly what they're doing, working through notifying and transitioning 170,000 customers is a lot of work. That work isn't free for Microsoft to provide. Cutting them off probably saved them $billions and many years of expensive, partial service deprecation.
Maybe. There's also about five guys at my work who would have loved the opportunity to use an LLM to set up a "non-propfit-brownout-pipeline-orchestrator" to transition 99% of these account to either a newly billable account, or a "bye-bye.zip" export available to the admin account. Two weeks of effort, tops.
Which part of the widely held and propagated opinions that such big corporations are owned and run by sociopaths/psychopaths do these NGOs not understand?
But really depends. I saw somewhere NPR lost 70 years of content doe to a Cloud bill not being paid on time or something ? I forgot the details.
I am sure there will be more of this since companies are depending on the Cloud for their data storage. Now with AI, who knows what will happen. I expect Cloud Admin people will eventually be replaced by some AI type system.
Companies really should backup all data and send off-site. But that will never happen because god-forbid, they will need to hire a real person.
You can try to offload responsibility from them, but every IT and DevOps person that has an inkling of competence knows you don't store your backups in the same place as your prod data.
In the sense that what the op wrote was wrong. You know, factually incorrect, bull, a yarn. Speaking as someone who used to let Iron Mountain come in to take backup tapes *off premises*
I've given Iron Mountain backup tapes too. That's not what happened here.
OSS was in charge of storage, and they appear to have had the only cop[ies] in an Iron Mountain facility. This setup was fundamentally broken.
Please be specific about what you think KetoManx64 got wrong.
If there were no backups then their initial statement was right. If there were "backups" in the same location then their revised statement was basically right, just don't nitpick the word "prod". If there's evidence of any copies existing anywhere else, like you would have in a normal contract directly with Iron Mountain, please link that evidence. It doesn't sound like the PBS station had a primary copy that was backed up by OSS, they gave the primary copy to OSS.
False: they did not lose the data; they temporarily lost access to it, because of Iron Mountain's security policies. They are, necessarily, pursuing remedies in court. They can and will regain access.
No Microsoft is not to blame. Whoever sells themselves into an all encompassing ecosystem with no exit plan or backup is to blame. It’s absolutely stupid thinking even if it’s the norm these days.
The cloud is a convenience at most and an expensive one. You do everything you need to do somewhere else and pray that no one else gets in or you get shot.
Please avoid this kind of scolding, berating tone on HN, and omit sneers, swipes, and name-calling from comments. The guidelines make it clear we're here for curious conversation, not this. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Sorry I didn't feel this was scolding but I look back and see it may be taken that way.
The nature of the comment was that we should strip the narrative about this being a non-profit from the discussion and apply what is left to ourselves. It acts as a warning that we should really evaluate and consider our trust relations with a vendor who has control over everything that we do. And make sure we don't make the same mistakes.
This article is about a group of people who are trying to make the world a better place in their own little way. Many of them do not have the technical skillset to understand the potential future problems they have since run into. Many of them, as you acknowledged, probably chose this option for convenience. Is it ideal? No. Is it the reality of the world we live in? Yes.
A bit of empathy goes a long way, doesn't cost you anything. You're not going to win many people over to your cause with this kind of vitriol.
Sorry if the tone was off but I'm trying to peel off the layers of narrative on this and get to the real story. And that is the all too common story of a combination of poorly defined and enforced policy by a vendor and a strategy of hope and ignorance from a customer.
The non-profit part of it is moot. This could happen to anyone. I'm more than a little annoyed that "non-profit" and "charity" is used to shape opinion. Having worked for a charity before, they aren't necessarily the bastions of moral virtue even when claiming non-profit status. I've seen cash efficiencies so low that there's almost no point in them existing. Not that it matters, again because this problem applies to non-profit and profit organisations.
Thus this should be a warning to people here to make sure that you have an exit plan and a strategy if you use the services regardless of who you are or what you do. Not hatred of the vendor. Because every single vendor out there can arbitrarily cut you off from a service at their will through automation, incompetence or malicious behaviour and there's probably nothing you can do about it.
As a daily Linux user and enthusiast, I detest statements like this. You did not read the article not the problem that those companies have and your only solution is "Use LibreOffice" without any actual interest in what their problem is or what an actual solution to their problems is. People like you push newbies away from Linux.
Using LibreOffice does not give you web sharing, nor permission systems, nor automation workflows, nor easy to use access controls, nor so many other things.
What features, besides macros which I haven;t used, are you finding worse in Libre Office than in MS Office?
I am using Libre Office for me household budget, and keeping track of cooking recipes. It is much better than MS Office because:
1. In Libre I can tell at a glance what my active cell is;
2. On my wife’s laptop at least, Office installed a DRM service that basically makes impossible to work on personal files on her work computer.
3. MS office insists each time I save a file to put it on OneDrive. Then I have to clock around to find the local folder and eventually save it locally. Libre just saves it locally from the first try,
Nope. I actually care enough to make this statement. Using such subscription products and then getting rug pulled isn't something easy for non technical users.
So just start with sovereign, better governed products with clear transparent pricing and better affordability to begin with.
Data interchange formats are more important than ever, and having programs that don't do too many things is just as important.
Not everyone starts thinking about Google Docs or WebDAV to begin with, and actually ... LibreOffice does a decent job here.
Don't bring up imaginary problems on Linux that people don't have. Losing access to accounts on a computer or a cloud service due to skunky companies is totally happening today though.
As another linux user, as in for everything, desktop, home & work, not just servers at work, for decades by now... they were correct. This kind of statement is counterproductive. It might not be thoughtless, but if not then it's the result of poor quality thought, so lack of thought would actually be the lesser insult.
Running Non Profit and managing infrastructure for pennies, is a real problem these non profits / small companies face.
If a multi trillion dollar company won't afford to burn a few million a month, good luck getting any of these folks to buy and host their Sharepoint for cheap.
This is not just a technical problem, and you know it. These people need real solutions, and asking for them to have an IT department isn't practically economical for them.
It actually is. Don't concentrate compute and data risks in a few vendors centralized who currently don't do a good job of hosting them nor saving them well.
It obviously costs money to run cloud storage and compute, do use whatever is available at hand first.
Microsoft is forcing people to use OneDrive on Windows and Office 365 by default, not realizing that it doesn't want to pay for dealing with all of this.
The centralized model is already failing, these providers are storing data they can't decide about and people are being forced to pay for features they don't need to use at all. None of these things help your case.
I was a Financial Analyst at Amazon and Starbucks for about 15 years total. Excel was my favorite tool. I used to say that if my employer would not pay for Excel I would pay for it out of me own money.
Almost 20 years later in 2026 I migrated all my personal stuff to Linux and Libre Office. I am amazed how much better this is than the Windows + Office setup my wife uses.
Just today I helped my wife with an Excel file. I can’t believe what garbage Excel is in 2026. For reference- I tried to use the Formula -> Show Dependent Cells feature. This feature showed NO dependent cells - even though these were in the row below. What a piece of garbage Excel became.
I was shocked when I imported a 1.5M row dataset into Office365 Excel and found that it had silently cropped my data to 1048576 rows. One million items is a ridiculously low limit for a modern computer, and deleting 1/3 of my data without any warning is unacceptable. 20 years ago Excel could handle 1.5 million rows without breaking a sweat but this webpage version isn't real Excel.
Right. Well funded corporate IT environments losing access to their data because Microsoft screws them over. Perfect. That's not what I'm reading here.
