On November 12, 2026, Microsoft 365 users across the Americas lost access to Outlook and Exchange Online. People reported failed logins, blank inboxes and messages stuck in the outbox, Teams and Copilot were affected too, and Downdetector logged more than 100,000 reports. Microsoft pointed to elevated load on part of its infrastructure and said it was redistributing traffic across its wider network while service recovered gradually.
Outages like this happen to every email provider, including Microsoft, Google and the server in your own closet. What changes from one platform to the next is how often it happens, who fixes it, and what you can do while you wait. This guide compares the main options for business email and then covers the part most companies skip: a plan for the day your email stops working.
Microsoft 365 is the default for most businesses that live in Word, Excel and Teams. Microsoft runs the servers, applies the patches and backs the service with a 99.9% uptime commitment.
Pros
Cons
Best for: companies standardized on Microsoft Office and Teams that want a managed service.
Managed for you: VND manages Microsoft 365 licenses for clients and serves as their administrator, handling users, security settings, mailbox issues and the support calls to Microsoft.
Google Workspace puts business email on Gmail with your own domain, plus Calendar, Drive, Docs and Meet. Like Microsoft, Google runs everything and offers a 99.9% uptime commitment.
Pros
Cons
Best for: smaller and newer teams that work mostly in the browser and value simplicity.
You run Microsoft Exchange on your own servers, in your office or in a private data center. The current version is Exchange Server Subscription Edition (SE), released in July 2025. Exchange 2016 and 2019 reached end of support on October 14, 2025, so servers still running them no longer get security fixes. A “hybrid” setup keeps some mailboxes on your own server and some in Microsoft 365.
Pros
Cons
Best for: organizations with compliance or control needs and a team, in-house or managed, that patches and monitors around the clock.
A middle path: hosted Exchange. You can get Exchange’s control without running the servers yourself. A hosting provider runs Exchange for you, either on a dedicated server just for your company or on a shared server with other businesses. VND hosts Exchange for clients in both models, with spam filtering, patching, monitoring and backups handled by our team. Because it runs outside Microsoft’s cloud, a hosted Exchange mailbox keeps working during a Microsoft 365 outage.
There are many smaller email services, from privacy-focused providers to hosting companies and open-source mail servers you run yourself. They can make good primary email for some teams and excellent backup email for most.
Pros
Cons
Best for: a secondary or emergency email route, small teams with simple needs, or companies that want full control with the skills to manage it.
From VND: our cPanel shared hosting plans include basic IMAP email. It is a good fit for non-mission-critical mailboxes and for a backup domain kept ready for outages.
| Microsoft 365 | Google Workspace | Self-hosted or hosted Exchange | Other providers / open source | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Who fixes an outage | Microsoft | You, or your hosting partner | The provider, or you | |
| Uptime commitment | 99.9% | 99.9% | Whatever you build | Varies by provider |
| Patching and security | Microsoft, plus your settings | Google, plus your settings | You, continuously | Provider, or you |
| Office and Teams fit | Best | Good, browser first | Best with Outlook | Basic (IMAP, SMTP) |
| Control over data | Shared with Microsoft | Shared with Google | Full | Varies, full if self-run |
| Upfront effort | Low | Low | High | Low to high |
| Good as a backup route | No, if it is your primary | Yes, beside Microsoft | Yes, beside a cloud provider | Yes |
There is no switch that loads a copy of your Microsoft 365 mailbox somewhere else while Microsoft is down. Your mailboxes, calendars and history live with your provider until it recovers. What you can do is plan a second way to keep talking, set up before the outage, not during it.
The good news: incoming mail usually is not lost. Email servers that cannot deliver a message keep retrying, typically for up to four or five days, under the internet email standard (RFC 5321). In a short outage, most incoming messages arrive late instead of disappearing.
Options that work, set up in advance:
One caution: changing your main domain’s DNS (MX records) in the middle of an outage to point mail somewhere new is risky. DNS changes can take hours to spread, and mail can end up split across two systems. Plan any failover with your IT team ahead of time.
Today, while it is down
This month, before the next one
VND has supported San Antonio businesses with custom software, managed IT, cloud and cybersecurity since 2002. For email, that means:
Schedule a consultation and we will review your email setup with you.
VND is dedicated to helping our clients with solutions that work. We offer customized pricing for companies big and small, no matter the industry. Tell us more about your project to get started.
