Credit: Salah Darwish on Unsplash Friday’s Microsoft outage has prompted fresh calls for Europe to control its own digital infrastructure, Politico Europe reported. The outage hit as EU leaders met in Dublin for their first summit on AI. The Outlook and Teams outage lasted nearly 24 hours and affected millions of users in 74 countries, Politico said. Many of the officials gathered in Dublin were among them.
Mistral chief executive Arthur Mensch briefed the leaders. He did not mention the outage, but made the case for spending at home. “Only 20% of European digital services run on European infrastructure,” he said afterwards, according to Politico. Money spent on US or Chinese tech could fund European infrastructure and research instead, he added. French President Emmanuel Macron closed the day with a post on X. “Our independence cannot be outsourced.
It must be built here at home, in Europe,” he wrote. Others pointed directly at the outage. Finnish MEP Aura Salla said Europe had handed too much of its digital infrastructure to firms outside the EU. She said government contracts should back European technology.
Sebastian Toffaletti of the Digital SME Alliance said the outage showed the risk of relying on a few tech giants. In the UK, Liberal Democrat Victoria Collins called for a digital sovereignty strategy. German Social Democrat Johannes Schätzl offered a test for buyers. “Digital sovereignty must be measured by whether we can remain operational even during outages like this,” he said. The calls are familiar.
Similar ones followed the CrowdStrike outage in 2024. This time, though, Brussels has a bill on the table. Its cloud law would rank cloud providers by how sovereign they are. Get the TNW newsletter ✕ Close Get the TNW newsletter Get the most important tech news in your inbox each week.
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