Microsoft did a crap thing, but regardless of the reason the data went away, their customers should all have had disaster recovery strategies and robust backups. The more precious the data, the more important it is to have robust backups.
I still feel for those affected, as I have lost data to my own mistakes in the past.
That’s the main reason why you don’t save data to one drive, unless you have at least one local backup.
And if you put anything on one drive, you better just put an encrypted backup there. No plain data.
The Quiet Decision Microsoft Quietly Made That Quietly Devastated Thousands of Quiet Nonprofits. Quietly.
The real headline:
Over 170,000 Nonprofits Lost All Their Data. Is Microsoft to Blame?
Not sure if Slate is A/B testing or if OP clickbait-ified the post title
Maybe it should read “170,000 nonprofits having to invoke their data restoration strategies and now in the market for ethical cloud providers, after Microsoft predictably lets them down”.
Checked the source code, looks like we’re dealing with three different titles here:
<title>Microsoft made a quiet change to a popular software grant. Small nonprofits lost everything.</title> <meta property="og:title" content="The Quiet Decision Microsoft Made That Devastated Thousands of Nonprofits" /> <h1 itemprop="headline" class="article__hed article__hed--" >Over 170,000 Nonprofits Lost All Their Data. Is Microsoft to Blame?</h1>I took the title lemmy suggested after I pasted the URL into the Create Post page.
Clickbait title.
downvoted.How is it a clickbait title?
Instead of stating the obvious that microsoft deleted data, it’s hiding it in a mysterious “decision”. Making user click through it to find out what they actually did.
I suppose that’s fair. I’m so desensitized that this doesn’t seem as bad by comparison; but I don’t want to discourage anyone from calling it out. My educated guess from when I first read the title turned out to be right, so it didn’t register that way for me initially. But you’re right, in the end. It’s a massive problem right now, it’s hard to get away from it enough as a consumer.
It’s a hard one. Because i also dislike Microsoft for what they did and want to upvote for visibility.
Make a report. IMO all news articles should have the original title as the post title.
This is so devastating to hear about. I feel for these companies, a loss like this hits so hard and can be so, so hard to recover from.
Microsoft deserves all of the shitty PR for this shit.
This should also be a gentle lesson about not leaving all of your eggs in one basket, especially if it’s a free product.
Khosla had seen Microsoft’s announcement last year that it was winding down its free nonprofit licenses beginning July 2025, but, per the record, he should have still been in the clear. He renewed Canopy’s yearly license last October, and Microsoft had emailed him to confirm he would retain access until Oct. 4, 2026. Khosla had no reason to expect anything would change, and he received no additional warnings—even as Microsoft kept in regular touch about other software updates. 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.
In a statement emailed to Slate, Microsoft wrote that the original offers were “retired to streamline our grant offerings and simplify our grant portfolio,” adding, “We strongly advised our nonprofit customers and partners to transition to a different Microsoft 365 offer for nonprofits before their renewal date to avoid disruption and data loss.”
As an IT person I can’t imagine just deleting customers’ data one day without keeping an archival copy. This feels like a mistake, in which case they’re being dishonest in order not to admit to their mistake. And if it wasn’t a mistake, it’s a sign that they aren’t competent at understanding their customers, making plans, or communicating. Either way, it shows Microsoft is not a company you can have confidence doing business with.
Holy shit. I mean minus points for storing all your company’s data in OneDrive and just kinda trusting Microsoft, but also, holy shit is that fucked up on Microsoft’s part. Literally telling people “you’re good till your subscription ends” and then surprising them with “jk, we deleted all your data.”
And then this asinine corpo-speak response:
Microsoft wrote that the original offers were “retired to streamline our grant offerings and simplify our grant portfolio,” adding, “We strongly advised our nonprofit customers and partners to transition to a different Microsoft 365 offer for nonprofits before their renewal date to avoid disruption and data loss.”
No they fucking didn’t!
I saw this on a few sysadmin posts, from what I saw and what people described I have a theory that it was an unexpected interaction.
Those with the deletion had a expiration date for the donation licenses past the July '26 deadline. That shouldn’t have happened as far as I can tell from the notification email. We had some of these, but I think the difference was the presence of other licenses.
Those with only the 10 donations and none of the other free licenses, would have become unlicensed when they were removed. There is a cool off for deletions, but if the licence had the wrong expiration, then the deadline date might have been set from the original expiration. Due to the incorrect extension that date might then have been in the past. Leading to the wrong deletions.
I have no way to confirm any of that and ms are not going to admit it. I don’t think it was malicious, but is still a appalling show from Microsoft.
I just have a regular home license and one day my one drive was empty. The one drive I’ve pulled everything out of and after windows updates everything would be back in there again. Microsoft basically said there was nothing that could be done to recover my data. I switched to Linux that day. Like I specifically removed my files and turned off one drive in multiple occasions. And they turn it back on and move the My Documents folder back with no warning breaking folder paths for games. Such a shit company.
That is so fucked up.
I remember that happening, I think they did eventually fix that
Keep in mind that you need backups perhaps moreso than you did when using OneDrive - 3-2-1 being robust without going crazy.
Oh that’s exactly how I wasn’t screwed. I had just done my backup 5 days before.
it’s a sign that they aren’t competent at understanding their customers, making plans, or communicating
For me that was self-evident when they rolled out Windows 11.
I would go a bit further than that. To me, not keeping archival backups for at least a few months seems grossly negligent. To a degree where they should be legally liable for the damages. They probably have some waivers for that in their terms… but they may not hold depending on the jurisdiction.
Fun story.
The licensing changed for Gates’ own Nonprofits too.
Khosla was stupid though, he should’ve just use Linux plus COLLABORA Office and/or LibreOffice.
so does LibreOffice bring Microsoft more users or Microsoft bring LibreOffice more users?
Microsoft is the one bringing more user to LibreOffice, which is confused because it didn’t even do anything to attract more people
rhetorical question. i was making a point that the meme goes both ways.
This is more about cloud storage than anything else though
Switch microslop and libreoffice
I just found out yhat you can’t trust Microsoft because they’re evil fucks! Pass the word!
I’ve been doing that for the past 35 years already.
Almost 30 years here! I went from people around me at work knowing there were alternatives to people being shocked…SHOCKED…I could “do computers” without Windows or MacOS. What a whirlwind it’s been…sigh.
Used to be able to buy PCs running Xenix, with Lotus and vi. Who really needed anything more?
Once upon a time IBM was the evil empire and Microsoft were the good guys. Remember, there’s no BM like IBM.
I’m increasingly convinced that “The Cloud” is just a scam. Just keep your own files.
It’s been happening as long as the internet has existed. Most of us learned this lesson earlier in life when we lost files to geocities/homestead/imgbucket going belly up
But the cloud is buying up all the memory and storage
I never have and never will trust “the cloud”. If someone else is holding your data, it is no longer your data.
I pay for someone else to hold an encrypted backup of some data. The living data is in my server, they’re just one of the backups in case there’s a fire at my house or something. I pay because I expect legal liability from them to hold my data safely, no freemium shenanigans. And I encrypt because no one can be trusted not to mine my info for AI or sell my shit to a shady third party for profit.
I get a discount on OneDrive, making it the cheapest storage I can get, and it acts like this for me. Unfortunately the interface between Linux and OD leaves much to be desired.
No, the cloud is just someone else’s computer.
No,the cloud is just someone else’s computer.FTFY
They are not mutually exclusive.
It’s someone else’s scam?
Somone scam computer?
computer scam someone?
Someone else scamputer
Scamelse puter someone
Always has been. Bait and switch etc.
For specificity, and to be fair to small-fry private cloud vendors, there’s nothing inherently scammy about offering remote IT infrastructure for rent.
But it absolutely applies to the large hyperscaler cloud providers like MS, simply because enshittification is plan A, the optimal and preferred end game for any product described as a “platform.”
Why:
Platforms rely on network effects, the standout feature of which is that user acquisition directly scales platform valuation, customer retention, and competitive advantage all at the same time.Once that market dominance is sufficient, you can squeeze customers with relative impunity, because your original competitors either went under or are too far behind to be a threat.
The rainmaking phase of enshittification is why VCs are willing to dump so much money into bootstrapping startups (to hasten their market dominance). It’s why many products and services everyone pays for now were once sold at a loss or even offered free of charge. And it’s why shareholders will keep shares of unprofitable companies for years or even decades.
Enshittification is the ultimate payoff of the platform model/scheme and has been from the beginning.
Sure, this small and mid-size services are just fine for backing up your data, and should surely be used as such. But using “cloud services” is nonsense. Too bad it has such good marketing.
So good i literally had a fucking CEO ask me “well what about this cloud thing?? Should we get rid of our citrix and use that??”
Here is a list of scenarios where it’s OK to trust Microslop:
You forgot that and .
damn! I always miss some
What if there is a fire at the attractive children’s orphanage and Bill Gates offers them a new home on an island he’s developing?
Aww, did I insult a likely pedo billionaire that the folks here like?
Why would that make it more okay to trust Microslop?
The topic of insulting or defending billionaires aside, that doesn’t even have anything to do with the topic. I’m not sure anyone here thinks Gates is a good person, it’s just that your comment is a plain nonsensical non-sequitur making up a contrived scenario unrelated to the conversation.
It figures that when you say something dumb that you blame other people for it
Just learn from your mistake and move on, like an adult.
Not sure what the dumb thing would be. Seems extremely likely that Bill Gates was also part of the child raping. Melinda specifically saying his relationship with Epstein was a big part of the divorce and yet refusing to ever say she didn’t suspect him of having sexual relationships with children and instead saying people should ask those questions of him is an insanely large red flag.
What does this have to do with the comment that was replied to
Read them a few times and I’m sure you’ll manage to puzzle your way through it.
Yeah this is why no one likes you
Fortunately I’m not entered in the online popularity contest.
It figures that when you say something dumb
Not sure what the dumb thing would be.
What does this have to do with the comment that was replied to
Honestly, if you couldn’t connect those dots I couldn’t think of a way to explain it to you.
Jumanji was a pretty good movie about a puzzle.
Sounds like a big painting brush toward profit and Microsoft had the usual shit communication and execution.
More to the point though, this is the fundamental lesson many people who say they went to business school or are IT experts are apparently now learning; if it’s not free and open source you can’t depend on it staying that way and the last 10 years has been a sprint to enshittify. Why someone in IT would base their entire storage and archive practice on the assumption a paid service or grant will remain free through grants, when there is no money to go around to pivot the org is naive at best. I see these as the same type who will rail against inequality, fascism, etc. and then be on Twitter and Facebook. The nobler aspects of man cannot coexist alongside boundless greed and fascism. Move early or be prepared to “be shocked” when structural inevitability comes.
Libre Office and countless other options are out there, just waiting to be adopted. The cells have been made very comfortable by our jailers, but the keys are right there if you want freedom.
Generally hasn’t been IT making these decisions. Same as cloud fundamentally just meaning offsite storage someone else owns. The PR push about how it somehow is not that was/is massive.
The momentum of cross functionality is also massive. There exist many programs and websites that do not accept non-microslop files.
Management is obsessed with the cloud and “serverless”, because it’s cheaper short-term, and they don’t have to care about eventualities like hardware breaking.
Long-term, it would be far cheaper and way more secure to host locally, especially for data storage.
But we all know long-term thinking is something that management can’t do. And of course, the PR doesn’t help at all.
Yup, as a sr sysadmin I fought hard against moving our servers to the cloud. But the company never actually listened to IT about IT things.
You actually need to have your own servers or actively use multiple platforms as well as backup your data. No platform is forever and some are only there at a whim. Google has a bad habit of unpredictably locking up your data too.
I’ll take The Noisy Decisions RMS and Linus Torvalds Made That Devastated Microsoft for all the marbles, Alex.
Play stupid games win stupid prices
