Microsoft 365 went down on Friday morning, taking Outlook email and Teams with it for businesses around the world. When your whole working day depends on one company’s cloud services, an outage like this can stop everything at once.
A couple of Microsoft 365 alternatives for staying in touch with your colleagues, email services, and sharing files can turn the next Microsoft outage into an annoyance instead of a lost day.
What a Microsoft 365 outage breaks
Problems were reported in the early hours of Friday 13th November. Outage tracker Downdetector logged over 130,000 Outlook reports at its peak around 5:15AM AEDT.
Microsoft labelled it a degradation of its business and enterprise services. Its status page listed Exchange Online, Teams, SharePoint Online, Copilot, and Defender as affected services, warning that users in any region could be affected by the outage.
The trouble came from some servers failing automated health checks and dropping offline, which pushed extra load onto the rest. At the time of writing, the outage has not been fully resolved.
Microsoft 365 alternatives for small business
The outage took down several key things businesses rely on every day: chat, meetings, email, and shared files. All of these have solid alternatives.
Instead of Teams
A collaborative chat workflow has become central to how many small businesses operate today.
Slack is built for day-to-day team messaging. Its free plan keeps 90 days of message history and limits calls to one-to-one, which is good enough for a stopgap. Paid plans add full history and group calls, making it a close match to Teams.
Zoom is a well-known alternative for video meetings, but it has grown beyond just video with a calendar, mail client, basic documents and whiteboards. Its free plan covers video meetings up to 40 minutes with up to 100 people.
Instead of Outlook
Business email often needs your own domain name and a shared calendar, ruling out most free webmail.
Fastmail is based in Melbourne. Its business plans include calendars and contacts, support your own domain, and come with a 30-day free trial. It was founded in 1999 and has been independently owned since staff bought it back from Opera in 2013.
Proton Mail is one of our favourite personal email services, and it has a business plan too. Mail Essentials costs EUR €6.99 per user per month, billed annually, with 15GB of storage each, up to three custom domains, and a shared calendar. It also features a streamlined migration feature.
To help make the switch easier, check out our guide on moving email providers.
Instead of SharePoint
SharePoint is one of the toughest services to replace, though there are good alternatives.
Dropbox team plans allow you to share folders across staff, and the desktop app can keep whole folders downloaded to ensure they open without a connection. Edits made offline sync back automatically once the connection returns.
Box is a direct SharePoint rival with a plan built for small teams. Its Starter plan covers three to ten people with 100GB of storage, shared folders, and a desktop app that can keep chosen files on your computer for offline use.
A NAS (network-attached storage) can keep shared files on a machine in your own office. Staff can reach it over a local network, so it keeps working when the internet doesn’t. With proper security, it can be reached online too.
Instead of Office
Installed copies of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint kept working through the current outage, though features like Copilot and SharePoint Online didn’t. Microsoft only requires them to check a licence once every 30 days, so files stored on your own computer stay available.
If you want an alternative anyway, our favourite is LibreOffice. It’s free and open-source software from The Document Foundation, a Berlin-based non-profit. It opens and saves Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files, needs no account, and has no subscription or advertising.
Don’t swap one trap for another
Moving everything to one new provider means you’re reliant on one company’s servers for all of your infrastructure. If you’d still rather have one suite for everything, Proton Workspace is our recommendation.
There are a few good habits that can reduce your reliance on online tools no matter what workflow you’re using.
Pick a backup chat channel. Agree where the team can talk when Teams or Slack is down, and make sure everyone can use it before it’s needed.
Keep key files offline. If you stay on SharePoint or use another cloud-based file service, mark the folders you need to be stored offline.
Keep contact details outside the system. Phone numbers and email addresses for staff and key clients should be available to you even when email is down.
No cloud service is immune to outages, but distributing the risk makes it far less likely that one outage takes everything down at once.
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