In 2013, Microsoft began offering its software free to nonprofits: Word, Excel, OneDrive, and the full Office 365 suite, at a time when tech companies, including Microsoft, were promoting their charitable giving.
Over the next decade, nonprofits built themselves up around that offer, storing donor records, grant applications, and years of institutional knowledge within the Microsoft suite.
Then, sometime in the past year, without most of them noticing, access to that data began to disappear.
A recent Slate report(neues Fenster) alleges that Microsoft’s wind-down of the free nonprofit grant left small organizations locked out of years of data, with little or no warning.
What sources are alleging
Ronald Khosla, who runs the environmental nonprofit Canopy, got an email in May 2025 warning that his organization’s Microsoft grant would be discontinued and his license would expire that October. When he renewed that October, though, Microsoft’s confirmation email said nothing about the phaseout, and told him he would retain access until October 4, 2026. He logged in that June to find years of files gone anyway. A Microsoft representative later told him roughly 171,000 nonprofits had lost their OneDrive data the same way, a figure relayed to Khosla by phone.
One source, who runs a child healthcare nonprofit, said he searched his organization’s email archives, including the spam folder, and found “zero notification” from Microsoft about the license termination. The operator of a disability services nonprofit told Slate it will take him and his mother “hundreds of hours” to recreate the instructional videos and documents they lost. Microsoft told Slate it “began notifying nonprofit customers in Spring 2025.”
The complaints are on Microsoft’s own platform, too
These allegations aren’t confined to one article. Nonprofit admins have posted the same complaint, data suddenly inaccessible after a licensing change, directly on Microsoft’s own Tech Community forums(neues Fenster), in multiple(neues Fenster) threads(neues Fenster).
Security researcher Kevin Beaumont, a former senior threat intelligence analyst at Microsoft, has separately flagged(neues Fenster) that Microsoft’s own notification emails often go unseen because they’re sent to admin accounts that aren’t set up to be monitored, which often land in the spam folder.
A free grant isn’t a backup plan
Whatever the exact numbers, the pattern alleged here is structural: Nonprofits built infrastructure around a single vendor’s free tier, with no easy export path or independent backup.
For nonprofits with budgets under $1 million (the majority of US nonprofits), the value of Microsoft’s free software equated to about 30% of their IT spending, according to Slate.
When that vendor changed course, the data went with it. A free grant is not a guarantee; it’s a product decision, reversible at any time, with an organization’s data as collateral.
The dependency problem isn’t unique to nonprofits either, as over 74% of publicly listed European companies depend on US tech like Microsoft and Google.
A special Proton offer for impacted nonprofits
Nonprofits affected by Microsoft’s rollback can now get Proton Drive free for the first year — for up to 20 users — then move to nonprofit pricing for subsequent years.
Every other Proton product, including the full Workspace suite covering Mail, Drive, Docs, VPN, Pass, and Calendar, is also available at nonprofit discount rates.
Both offers run through Proton’s sales team, and organizations applying will need to show proof of eligibility, that they’re a nonprofit and that they were affected by the Microsoft data loss.
