Over 170k Nonprofits Lost All Their Data. Is Microsoft to Blame?

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Ronald Khosla, a former vegetable farmer and tech entrepreneur, keeps things simple at his nonprofit: He’s the co-founder, president, and head of IT for Canopy, a modest venture firm that offers capital to startups trying to protect and sustain our natural world.

“There’s no paid staff, and we mostly support niche tech projects, like people exploring new ways to preserve trees in Morocco or to regeneratively regrow a pasture in Oregon,” Khosla told me.

Keeping such a sparse, specified operation going means narrowing budgets wherever possible, especially when it comes to managing Canopy’s investments and data. For that, he’s depended for years on special licenses Microsoft has granted to smaller-size nonprofits around the world, offering them a premium suite of Office apps (Word, Excel, OneDrive) at no charge.

At least, he did until June 11, when Khosla logged on to find that all the Canopy data stored with Microsoft had been deleted. He immediately called the tech company’s support staff, who said Canopy could retrieve its files. Later, they called back to inform him that, actually, those were gone forever.

What happened to Khosla was just one instance of a crisis that has rocked small nonprofit owners across the globe, who allege that Microsoft failed to communicate with them in a substantive manner about the license cancellations and left them unable to prepare their organizations for the future. As they’ve related online, these already resource-strapped nonprofits have lost troves of data, are struggling to continue their operations, and have been left unable to make up the technology gaps with alternative services. People who run service orgs with low budgets and benefited for years from Microsoft’s programs no longer have much of the technology they need to keep things going—for either the short or long term.

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