Over 170k Nonprofits Lost All Their Data. Is Microsoft to Blame?(slate.com)
291 points by tchalla 17 days ago | 152 comments
tl;dr: Microsoft retired its free Business Premium nonprofit grant program in mid-2025, and roughly 171,000 small NGOs reportedly had their OneDrive data permanently deleted, with many claiming they received little or no advance warning beyond notices sent to rarely-checked admin email accounts. Microsoft says it notified customers and advised migration to paid tiers, but affected nonprofits—many operating on sub-$1M budgets that relied on the grant for ~30% of IT spend—are now scrambling to rebuild lost files and find affordable alternatives. Critics suspect the move ties to Microsoft's cost-cutting and storage demands amid its AI buildout.
HN Discussion:
  • Microsoft should have used a brownout or read-only period instead of hard deletion
  • ~Admins receive constant alerts causing fatigue, so notification claims are weak justification
  • Microsoft has become an untrustworthy, unserious company
  • Notifications were actually sent multiple times and not caught by spam filters
  • ~Organizations shouldn't rely on cloud services or corporate generosity for critical data