99.99% uptime for Azure Active Directory Premium customers is coming April 1st, 2021
Published date: January 26, 2021
On April 1, 2021, Azure Active Directory will update our public service level agreement (SLA) to promise 99.99% uptime for Azure AD user authentication for all licensed Azure AD Premium customers, an improvement over our previous 99.9% SLA. This change is the result of a significant and ongoing program of investment in continually raising the bar for resilience of the Azure AD services.
Because our identity services are vital to keep customer businesses running, resilience and security are and always will be our top priority. In the last year, we've seen a surge in demand as organizations moved workforces online and schools enabled study from home—in fact, some national education systems moved entire student populations online with Azure AD. Azure AD is now serving more than 400 million Monthly Active Users (MAU) and processing tens of billions of authentications per day. We treat every one of those authentication requests as a mission critical operation.
In conversations with our customers, we learned that the most critical promise of our service is ensuring that every user can sign into the apps and services they need without interruption. To deliver on this promise, we are updating the definition of Azure AD SLA availability to cover user authentication and federation (and removing administrative features). This focus on critical user authentication scenarios aligns our engineering investments with the vital functions that must stay healthy for customers to run their businesses.
Read our blog post for additional information.