When Microsoft Azure falls below its 99.99% uptime commitment, you are owed service credits. Here is exactly how the Azure Virtual Machines (Availability Set) schedule works, and how to claim what you are due.
Service credits are calculated against your monthly bill for the affected service, based on its Monthly Uptime Percentage.
| Monthly uptime | Equivalent downtime | Service credit |
|---|---|---|
| 99.0% – < 99.99% | 4 min/mo – 7.2 hrs/mo | 10% |
| 95.0% – < 99.0% | 7.2 hrs/mo – 36 hrs/mo | 25% |
| Below 95.0% | 36 hrs/mo – 720 hrs/mo | 100% |
Azure credits are not automatic, and not every outage counts. Check each condition below before you spend time building a claim.
Azure VMs hit 99.99% only across an Availability Zone deployment. An Availability Set gets 99.95%, and a single instance needs Premium SSD or Ultra Disk on every disk just to reach 99.9%. Match your topology to the right commitment before you measure.
Azure measures uptime per resource across the billing month. Connectivity must fail to two or more instances (for multi-instance SLAs) before the minutes count against the Monthly Uptime Percentage.
Outages caused by your application, configuration, or anything Microsoft classes as a Force Majeure or excluded event do not reduce the Monthly Uptime Percentage.
Free, trial, and certain promotional subscriptions are excluded. Credits apply to the paid subscription that incurred the charges for the affected resource.
Credits are not automatic. You have 60 days to file. Follow these steps.
Determine which Azure resource (VM, App Service, SQL Database) fell below its Monthly Uptime Percentage commitment, using Azure Monitor and Service Health.
Export Azure Monitor metrics and Service Health history showing the start and end of each unavailability window during the billing month.
Open a billing support request in the Azure portal (Help + support, then New support request, then Billing) within two months of the incident.
Approved Service Credits appear on a subsequent monthly invoice for the affected subscription and service.
Enter your spend and downtime to see what Azure owes you.
A complete evidence pack is the single biggest factor in getting a credit approved on the first pass. Tick each item off as you collect it, then export the list for your ticket.
Gather every item below before you file. Complete evidence is the single biggest factor in getting a credit approved on the first pass.
Fill in your incident details and we will write a claim email in Azure's own terms, with the credit math already worked out. Copy it, attach your evidence, and send.
Review before sending. Figures are estimates based on Azure's flagship compute SLA. Attach your evidence and verify against your current agreement.
Run your spend and downtime through the calculator, then use this guide to file inside the window.