Microsoft's Quiet Decision That Devastated 170,000 Nonprofits
Over 170k Nonprofits Lost All Their Data. Is Microsoft to Blame?
When Microsoft retired its free nonprofit software grants, over 170,000 small organizations lost all their data without warning. Slate investigates how the tech giant's phaseout, announced only in a buried blog post, left nonprofits like Canopy and a child healthcare organization with no recourse. Despite Microsoft's claim of advance notice, many say they received no emails, and the company's support offered no recovery. The article explores the impact on underfunded groups, the political and AI-driven motives behind the cut, and the scramble to rebuild from scratch.
There’s no easy or quick alternative that we can make work in the short term.
- yieldcrv
- 12_throw_away
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.
- valicord
According to https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/commerce/sub... the data should not be deleted for 90 days after license expiration - what am I missing?
- WalterBright
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.
I replaced it with Thunderbird Mail.
- NordSteve
I'm a tenant admin for a non profit. Just looked and I have 8 emails to two different addresses warning me about the transition.
None were caught in the Microsoft or Fastmail spam filters.
- rectang
Why not start with a brownout? Make the data temporarily inaccessible, but don’t actually delete it immediately.
- sixtyj
Cloud is nice if it works. Web hosting is nice if you pay for it.
In history timeline, future archaeologists will probably see almost nothing, some books… as we are used to past centuries. But clouds, servers… gone.
BTW don’t use SSD for archiving.
- systemstops
That was devastating to a summer camp that do so volunteer IT work for. By the time they called me, the data was long gone.