Microsoft has told nonprofit customers that data deleted during the retirement of its Microsoft 365 Business Premium grant cannot be recovered. The company confirmed to The Register that an error caused remaining data to be deleted before the retention period ended, after the subscriptions had already been deactivated.
The grant, which gave eligible nonprofits ten free Business Premium licenses, was announced in May 2025 to end after July 1. Microsoft urged customers to move to another nonprofit plan or export anything they did not intend to keep. In an email to one affected customer, Microsoft said it had investigated recovery options but the data could not be recovered.
Microsoft also said it is currently unable to provide a list showing which data may have been deleted, or even whether any data was deleted at all. It did not disclose how many nonprofits were affected, how early the deletion occurred, or what caused the error. The company is offering affected organizations a free concierge service to help set up a new Microsoft 365 environment, which does little to replace the data that was lost.