This Service Level Agreement ("SLA") describes service level objectives, credit mechanics, and exclusions for eligible NorthShield ("NorthShield") protection services covered by a paid Order that expressly references this SLA.

This SLA supplements, and does not replace, the Terms of Service. In the event of conflict, the Terms of Service control except where this SLA expressly provides a service credit remedy for a defined SLA failure.

For purposes of this SLA:

• "Monthly Uptime Percentage" means the percentage of total minutes in a calendar month during which the Covered Service is Available, calculated as described below.
• "Available" means that NorthShield's scrubbing edge or designated tunnel handoff point for the Covered Service is able to receive and forward clean traffic according to the active configuration, excluding Excluded Downtime.
• "Covered Service" means a production protection service identified in your Order and provisioned on NorthShield's network, excluding trials, betas, courtesy services, and on-premise software unless separately stated.
• "Excluded Downtime" means any period of unavailability caused by an event listed in Section 6.
• "Service Credit" means a billing credit applied to future invoices, not a cash refund, unless we agree otherwise in writing.

For eligible Covered Services on standard production plans, NorthShield targets 99.9% Monthly Uptime Percentage measured at the NorthShield edge for the protected service path defined in your Order.

Enterprise or custom plans may specify different targets in a signed Order. Where a signed Order states a higher or lower target, that Order prevails.

Availability is measured using NorthShield's internal monitoring systems. External third-party probes, customer-origin monitoring, or upstream provider metrics are not controlling for SLA measurement unless expressly agreed in writing.

Monthly Uptime Percentage is calculated as:

((Total minutes in month − Downtime minutes) ÷ Total minutes in month) × 100

Downtime minutes include only periods where the Covered Service is unavailable due to a failure attributable to NorthShield's core scrubbing or tunnel delivery path, as confirmed by our operations team. Partial degradation, increased latency, packet loss during attack conditions, or selective protocol impact may not constitute Downtime unless the Covered Service is wholly unavailable for its primary protected path.

If Monthly Uptime Percentage falls below the committed target in a calendar month, you may request a Service Credit according to the table below, subject to all conditions in this SLA.

• 99.0% to < 99.9%: 5% of monthly fees for the affected Covered Service.
• 95.0% to < 99.0%: 10% of monthly fees for the affected Covered Service.
• < 95.0%: 25% of monthly fees for the affected Covered Service.

Service Credits are your sole and exclusive remedy for failure to meet the uptime commitment, except where applicable law prohibits such limitation.

The maximum Service Credit in any calendar month is 25% of the monthly fees for the affected Covered Service. Credits apply only to fees for the impacted service, not unrelated products, overage, setup, or professional services.

To receive a credit, you must submit a written request to your account representative within ten (10) calendar days after the end of the month in which the alleged failure occurred, including dates, times, affected prefixes or services, and reasonable supporting detail.

We will review the request using our logs and monitoring records. Our determination is final for credit purposes, provided it is made in good faith.

Credits are applied to a future invoice and expire if not used within twelve (12) months. Credits do not entitle you to terminate for cause unless otherwise stated in your Order.

No Service Credit applies, and downtime caused by the following is excluded from SLA measurement:

• Scheduled maintenance announced at least twenty-four (24) hours in advance, emergency maintenance required for security or stability, and platform upgrades.
• Customer-caused issues including misconfiguration, incorrect BGP announcements, unauthorized prefix changes, expired credentials, firewall rules on origin, saturated origin links, or failure to follow onboarding requirements.
• Attacks or traffic volumes exceeding the committed clean or mitigation capacity specified in your Order, including attacks that require temporary blackholing, rate limiting, protocol blocking, or upstream coordination.
• Novel, zero-day, or unusually distributed attack patterns requiring manual intervention, vendor updates, or policy changes beyond standard automation.
• Failures of third-party networks, transit providers, IXPs, registrars, DNS operators, CDN providers, or customer upstreams not controlled by NorthShield.
• Issues with customer hardware, colocation facilities, hypervisors, game server software, or application-layer defects outside NorthShield's filtering scope.
• Suspension or traffic shaping applied to protect the broader network, other customers, or to comply with law.
• Force majeure events, Internet-wide routing anomalies, cable cuts, power failures, DDoS campaigns targeting multiple providers simultaneously, or government actions.
• Trial, beta, preview, or unpaid services; on-premise deployments unless a separate signed SLA applies.

SLA protection applies only if you:

• Maintain a paid Order in good standing with no overdue invoices.
• Complete onboarding, announce only authorized prefixes, and keep contact and escalation information current.
• Use supported tunnel types, protocols, and capacity tiers defined in your Order.
• Respond within a reasonable time to requests for configuration changes needed to restore service.
• Do not materially exceed declared traffic baselines or commit abusive or illegal use.

NorthShield will use commercially reasonable efforts to respond to production-impacting incidents according to the support tier in your Order.

Incident response timelines are targets, not guarantees. Mitigation actions may include selective filtering, temporary null routing, or capacity redistribution to preserve overall network stability.

Support response times do not create separate Service Credits unless expressly defined in a signed enterprise support addendum.

We may update this SLA by posting a revised version on our website. Changes apply prospectively and do not reduce committed targets for an active prepaid term already covered by a signed Order unless you agree otherwise.

Submit SLA credit requests through your account manager or the contact channels listed on our website. Include the affected service, incident timeframe, and any internal ticket references.