Disclosure: this article contains affiliate links to Infomaniak. If you sign up for a paid service through them, I earn a small commission. It costs you nothing extra, and the full note is at the bottom.
Since Thursday, a lot of people have been unable to send or receive email. Their calendars have stopped working, and so have their Teams calls and chats. Microsoft 365 is failing across the world, and on Friday the 13th nobody can tell you when it will be back.
I managed one Teams call. It was only five minutes long, but it worked, which puts me among the lucky few.
What Microsoft Has Said
Microsoft has given no date for a fix, and by its own account its fixes have not gone as expected so far (TechRadar). Its status updates blame load, and say the load does not come from more traffic: a large number of servers became unavailable without warning, and their work has shifted onto the ones that are left (XDA).
What Microsoft has not said is why so many servers went down at once. It could be something inside its own network using up resources it should not, or it could be an attack. It will probably be some time before we know.
What to Do Today
Several clients have asked me what to do. My answer for most of them is to wait until it blows over, and to stay reachable some other way in the meantime:
- Your fallback address: if you have an email address with another provider, use it, and tell your customers and suppliers that is where to find you for now.
- Messaging apps: Signal, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, or Slack if your team is still on it.
- Social media: post on the channels your customers follow that your email is down, and how to reach you instead.
Moving Your Email Now
If you would rather not wait, you can move your email to another provider quickly. I am busy today doing exactly that for clients. Some of them have switched to my own mail service for the time being, so they can get at their mail while Microsoft sorts itself out. It does not take long.
Where I Would Move It
Wherever you go, pick somewhere you mean to stay, and pick the provider that gives you the best chance of staying up.
My first choice for anyone leaving Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace is still Infomaniak. It is Swiss and owned by its employees, and it is a certified B Corp. It runs its own data centres, which it says are powered by renewable electricity (Infomaniak), and it uses and champions open-source software. It is a reliable, fully featured alternative to Microsoft 365, and it comes with support.
There are others. Proton is Swiss and accepts your own domain. Tuta, which used to be called Tutanota, is German. Fastmail is another good option, and there are plenty more. I compared the European ones in more detail in an earlier article.
And you can always run your own mail service, if you want the control and are prepared for the upkeep.
Don’t Swap One Giant for Another
You could move to Google Workspace. I would not. Google has outages too: in June 2025 a fault in Google Cloud disrupted Gmail, Calendar, Drive and Meet for around three hours (Google). Gmail and Workspace depend on Google Cloud as much as Microsoft 365 depends on Microsoft’s own infrastructure, and a great many other companies run their services on one or the other.
Moving from Microsoft to Google is the same risk with a different logo. It does nothing to protect your business from the next outage.
The Bottom Line
For today, wait it out and stay reachable some other way. Once Microsoft is back, if this outage cost you a day’s work, move your email to a provider that is not one of the two giants, and move it once.
What’s Your Experience?
Did the outage stop your business today, and did you have a way round it? Tell me through social media.
If you want your email moved, for a few days or for good, book a call. Otherwise send me an email, and I will answer as soon as I can.
Disclosure
I moved from Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 to Infomaniak’s kSuite, and I have been happy enough with it to become an affiliate. Links to Infomaniak in this article carry a reference to me, and if you sign up for one of their paid services, I earn a small amount. It makes no difference to what you pay, and it is not why they are my recommendation. I switched first and signed up as an affiliate afterwards.
Photo by Jonathan Kemper on Unsplash, edited to show the outage
