Your internet went down for six hours last month. You lost work. You lost time. You probably lost money.
Here is the part nobody tells you. Your contract may owe you a refund for that outage. It is called an SLA credit. And most businesses never claim it.
What an SLA actually is
SLA stands for Service Level Agreement. It is the part of your contract where the carrier promises a certain uptime. Usually 99.9 percent. Sometimes 99.99 percent on a dedicated line.
That sounds like the internet never goes down. It does not mean that. It means the carrier is allowed a small amount of downtime each month. Go past that, and they owe you money back.
Here is the math on 99.9 percent uptime. That leaves room for about 43 minutes of downtime a month. Anything past 43 minutes is a broken promise. And a broken promise on paper is worth money.
Why the credit is not automatic
The carrier knows the internet went down. Their network monitoring saw it. So why don't they just refund you?
Because they don't have to. Almost every SLA puts the work on you. You have to notice the outage. You have to open a ticket. You have to ask for the credit in writing, usually within a set window.
Miss the window and the credit is gone. Comcast (see /providers/comcast) and most big carriers write the rules this way on purpose. The credit is real. But you have to go get it.
What the credit is worth
A credit is a slice of your monthly bill. The size depends on how long you were down.
On a dedicated internet line, the fees are steeper. That is because these lines carry a real uptime guarantee. A dedicated 1 gig line in a fiber market often runs $850 to $1,600 a month. A day of downtime on a line like that can mean a meaningful chunk back.
Cable internet is different. The guarantee is weaker or missing. So the credits are smaller. But they still exist, and they still add up.
We reviewed a bill for a firm in Atlanta (see /cities/atlanta) paying $40 a month over the going rate for 500 Mbps. They also had two outages that quarter with no credits claimed. Both were fixable. One with a letter. One with a phone call.
The steps to claim one
Here is the exact process. Do it every time the service drops.
Log the outage. Write down the date, the start time, and the end time. A screenshot of a down monitor helps. So does a photo of the modem lights.
Open a ticket right away. Call support the moment it happens. Get a ticket number. That number is your proof the clock started.
Read your SLA. Find the uptime number and the credit table. Find the claim window too. It is often 30 days from the outage.
Ask for the credit in writing. Email or a support ticket beats a phone call here. You want a paper trail. State the outage dates, the ticket number, and the credit you are owed.
Follow up. Carriers are slow on credits. If it is not on your next bill, call and reference your written request.
The part most people get wrong
They wait. An outage happens, they get annoyed, they move on. Then the claim window closes.
Put a rule in place instead. Any outage over 30 minutes gets a ticket the same day. Every time. That one habit turns a lost afternoon into money back.
Not sure what your SLA even says? Half the time it is buried in a document you never read. That is fine. Send us the bill and the contract. We will tell you what you are owed.