A subscription can get more expensive during the same period that the service has a bad reliability quarter.
That is irritating. It is not automatically proof that the company is charging more while permanently operating a worse system.
Microsoft 365 is useful here because Microsoft publishes enough numbers to separate those two claims.
The price went up
Microsoft announced a broad commercial Microsoft 365 price increase effective March 1, 2022. Business Basic moved from $5 to $6 per user, Business Premium from $20 to $22, Office 365 E1 from $8 to $10, Office 365 E3 from $20 to $23, Office 365 E5 from $35 to $38, and Microsoft 365 E3 from $32 to $36. Microsoft said the increase reflected the additional products and capabilities added to the suite over the previous decade. See Microsoft’s 2021 pricing announcement.
Microsoft raised commercial pricing again on July 1, 2026 for a range of Microsoft 365, Office 365, Business, Frontline, Windows, and related products. The company tied that increase to new security, management, storage, and AI capabilities. See Microsoft’s 2026 commercial pricing FAQ.
So the direction on price is documented.
Reliability has its own record
Microsoft also publishes quarterly worldwide uptime for Microsoft 365 business and enterprise services.
For 2022 and 2023, the published quarterly figures stayed between 99.98% and 99.99%. In 2024 and 2025, the numbers remained mostly in that range, although some quarters were lower, including 99.927% in the fourth quarter of 2024 and 99.954% in the fourth quarter of 2025.
Then the first quarter of 2026 dropped sharply to 99.526%.
That is a real documented reduction in availability compared with the surrounding quarters. It is not a screenshot from somebody whose Outlook stopped loading for ten minutes. It comes from Microsoft’s own service health and continuity data.
But the next number matters too.
Microsoft reports 99.994% worldwide uptime for the second quarter of 2026.
The service recovered.
A bad quarter is not a permanent decline
This is why “the service costs more and keeps getting worse” needs evidence.
The pricing trend is clear. The first quarter of 2026 was also clearly worse than Microsoft’s recent historical uptime figures. But the published data does not support saying Microsoft 365 entered a continuing reliability collapse. Q2 moved back above most recent quarters.
The more defensible complaint is narrower: paying customers can face higher renewal prices while still absorbing periods of materially worse availability, and the added features used to justify a price increase do not compensate a business at the moment mail, collaboration, or identity services are unavailable.
For a subscription platform, value is not only the feature list.
Reliability is part of the thing being purchased.
If a provider raises prices, the fair comparison is therefore not “more features than ten years ago.” It is what the customer pays now, what the service promises now, and how consistently the service actually works now.