Microsoft tells nonprofits their deleted M365 data isn't coming back

The Register ^ | Sep 28, 2026 | Carly Page

[dayglored]

Microsoft accidentally wiped some nonprofit customers' M365 data before their retention period expired – and now says it cannot tell them what disappeared, or even whether they lost anything.

The cockup followed Microsoft's retirement of its Microsoft 365 Business Premium grant, which gave eligible nonprofits ten free licenses for the productivity suite.

Microsoft announced in May 2025 that the grant would not renew after July 1 that year. It offered eligible nonprofits up to 300 free Microsoft 365 Business Basic licenses, alongside discounted pricing for plans including Business Premium.

The company urged customers to move users onto another nonprofit plan before cancellation to avoid disruption or data loss. Organizations could also export anything they did not intend to retain in Microsoft 365.

The problem arose after the subscriptions were deactivated. In an email to one affected customer seen by The Register, Microsoft admitted that, "due to an error," it had deleted remaining data before the retention and export window closed. Attempts to recover it had failed.

"We have now investigated the recovery options, but unfortunately, the data cannot be recovered," Microsoft said.

Redmond cannot determine what disappeared either. The company said it was "currently unable to provide a list showing which data may have been deleted or whether any data was deleted at all." It could say only that the problem involved expired Business Premium subscriptions.

Microsoft confirmed the premature deletion to The Register. "After the applicable notice periods concluded and subscriptions were terminated, an error resulted in remaining data, if any, being deleted before the retention period had ended," a spokesperson said. "The impacted content would have been data associated with a customer's expired M365 Business Premium subscription."

Microsoft did not say how many nonprofits were affected, how prematurely the deletion occurred, or what caused the error.

The company said it regretted the impact and was offering affected nonprofits a free "concierge service," a meeting with a Microsoft specialist to help set up a new Microsoft 365 environment and answer questions.

Useful if you need help building a shiny new environment. Less useful if what you really wanted was the data Microsoft deleted from the old one. ®

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TOPICS: Business/Economy
KEYWORDS: deleteddata; m365; microsoft; nonprofit; windowspinglist

[Seruzawa]

Lol. 2 TB plug in drives are cheap. I could see this “cloud” shyt a mile off. Never ever trust a 3rd party to store your data.

[Harmless Teddy Bear]

I use old software that I load from a disk and everything gets saved to server I own.

It is not that I don't trust Microsoft.....

Oh, wait.

Yes, it is!

[NavyShoe]

Cockup?

[dayglored]

> Cockup?

Brit slang for "f*ckup".

[Disambiguator]

Put your data in the cloud, they said.

It will be great, they said.

Maybe those in-house servers and backup systems weren’t so expensive after all.

[dayglored]

> Put your data in the cloud, they said. It will be great, they said. Maybe those in-house servers and backup systems weren’t so expensive after all.

I have some very important business-critical machines in the AWS EC2 server cloud.

With full backups in the AWS S3 storage cloud.

And copies of the backups in our ground datacenter storage.

And DR (disaster recovery) archives of those ground backups in separate storage.

Worth every penny, and every minute of effort to make sure they're all running right.

[daniel1212]

Save and save often.

Then there is
Google Graveyard. https://killedbygoogle.com/

[daniel1212]

Sometimes I just want to set my own margins and just type a simple letter, personal or business without fussing about with preset columns or having my cursor thrown about and with issues every which way. Sometimes I just want type writer functionality then save as a pdf or word document. There is a hard learning curve for all the various controls and wonder presets with bothe Office and LibreOffice.

LibreFffice. Fully free, thank God. Just r. click in a document, hit Paragraph, and see Index and spacings.

Besides, I can even make some nice signs on it.

[The Duke]

I keep a two-bay USB drive on my desk at home, with an 8T mechanical disk on each. Daily backups - local and cloud - get written to the first 8T drive each day, and second drive gets mirrored from the first drive once per week.

My top-level backup directories are named according to the max amount of data I allow them to contain (by convention). That way I know what size thumb drive to write them to when requested.

[MikelTackNailer]

You sound like a person who learned hard lessons. I thought USB sticks were great until finding they aren't reliable for data you really need saved. Now I use the aforementioned 2 Terabyte external drive with plans to get another to back THAT one up. LOL.

Got to hand it to the marketing wiz who thought of using "cloud" in place of "other's network servers to blindly trust if you're stupid".

It's not if we're paranoid, it's if we're actually paranoid enough.

[dayglored]

> Got to hand it to the marketing wiz who thought of using "cloud" in place of "other's network servers to blindly trust if you're stupid".

"The Cloud" terminology got its start in the 1970's, with telephone network engineers who would design telecom networks on whiteboards. They'd draw one network (say in their city) on the left side of the board, and a destination network (another city) on the right side of the board. All the interesting stuff would be happening in those two places, but they were connected in the real world by a huge network of telephone lines, switches, and other gear, whose details didn't matter to the design discussion.

So they would scribble a loopy oval shape on the board between the cities to represent all that other stuff. It was necessary to acknowledge its presence, but the details didn't matter. That loopy doodle caught on and became a standard way for the telecom engineers to represent "all that stuff in the middle where magic happens and the details don't matter".

It wasn't until a few decades later that some marketing person was watching a design review, and said out loud, "Hey what's that stuff in the middle? It looks like a cloud."

Later as the internet started to grow, the same "magic doodle" came to represent "the place where the magic happens and the details don't matter", the name "The Cloud" spread in usage, and after Amazon got AWS started up in their shopping server farms (a.k.a. "datacenters") in the early 2000's, people's data started living off-site, in "The Cloud".

As they say, "There is no 'Cloud' -- it's just somebody else's computer."

But long before the internet was invented, it was just a doodle in an engineering design on a whiteboard.

[MikelTackNailer]

Thank you for the excellent summation of how "the Cloud" came to be. Good of you to point out that Data Centers have been around long before we were told to panic over them, as well.