A rebate a provider grants when it misses its uptime commitment, capped at a fraction of the subscription and therefore unrelated to the loss suffered.
A service credit is what the contract grants when a provider misses the uptime it promised: a rebate expressed as a percentage of that period's invoice, usually capped between ten and thirty per cent and never convertible into damages. The mechanism is not cover but a liquidated penalty, and it sits alongside limitation of liability clauses that expressly exclude consequential loss, lost profit and reputational harm. The result is a structural gap that is the whole point: a customer whose operations stop for a full day receives a credit worth a few thousand pounds against a loss counted in millions. That gap is exactly what contingent business interruption cover exists to fill, which is why an underwriter reads the contractual caps before pricing the cover rather than after. Mistaking an uptime commitment for insurance is the most expensive error a buyer of managed services can make.
The faulty CrowdStrike update of 19 July 2024 disabled roughly 8.5 million Windows machines according to Microsoft. Delta Air Lines reported a loss of around 500 million dollars, bearing no relation to the contractual rebates available under service level commitments.
SLA credit, avoir SLA, crédit de service, engagement de disponibilité