A global Microsoft outage that disrupted Outlook and Teams services across 74 countries has renewed calls for Europe to reduce its dependence on American technology companies and strengthen its own cloud computing industry.
The disruption, which began on Thursday afternoon European time, left users unable to access emails and online meetings. Some doctors’ surgeries in the UK asked patients to telephone them with urgent enquiries. Microsoft said it had found no evidence of a cyberattack, but had not identified the root cause. Services were gradually restored on Friday.
The incident has added urgency to concerns about Europe’s reliance on a small number of US providers. Tommaso Valletti, professor of economics at Imperial College Business School and a former chief competition economist at the European Commission, said the outage highlighted the risks of depending heavily on a handful of large technology companies.
Amazon, Microsoft and Google control around 70% of the European cloud market, according to Synergy Research Group. European providers account for approximately 15%, down from 29% in 2017. Germany’s SAP and Deutsche Telekom are among the largest local players, but each holds only about 2% of the market.
The figures reflect a wider dependence on foreign technology, with around 80% of Europe’s digital infrastructure and technology coming from outside the European Union. A recent Eurobarometer survey found strong public support for digital infrastructure controlled within Europe, particularly in Sweden, Finland and Denmark.
Brussels pushes for European alternatives
The debate gained momentum on Wednesday when members of the European Parliament presented a draft report on the European Commission’s proposed Cloud and AI Development Act. The report calls for public authorities to purchase more cloud services from European companies.
Dutch Green MEP Reinier van Lanschot warned that dependence on foreign technology could leave critical systems vulnerable to decisions made outside Europe.
Concerns about access to technology increased in June when US company Anthropic suspended access to its Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5 AI models to comply with American export controls. Access was restored on 1 July.
The European Commission also plans to triple the bloc’s data centre capacity over the next five to seven years. Bidding for up to seven EU-backed artificial intelligence gigafactories closed on Thursday.
European companies seek a larger role
Europe has several companies operating in different parts of the technology industry, although none currently matches the scale of the American giants.
French AI developer Mistral AI was valued at €21 billion following a €3 billion funding round led by Samsung in September. In cloud computing, Germany’s STACKIT is developing an €11 billion AI data centre in Brandenburg. It has joined OVHcloud, Scaleway and Mistral in securing places on an EU sovereign cloud contract worth up to €180 million.
Germany’s Infineon is also seen as a potential beneficiary of growing demand for AI infrastructure through its production of power-management chips.
However, persuading businesses to switch providers remains difficult. A Bitkom survey found that 85% of German companies considered the country too dependent on US cloud services, yet 71% continued to use them. Research by IDC found that only 4% of European organisations planned to rely exclusively on local providers.
The European Parliament’s committees are due to discuss the draft legislation on 1 December. A committee vote is provisionally scheduled for March 2027, followed by a parliamentary vote in April. Microsoft has promised to publish a report explaining the outage once all services have been restored.
