Microsoft trap: 1 outage can bring businesses down

On Friday, the European Union institutions continued their regulatory work without interruption, despite a widespread digital outage at U.S. tech giant Microsoft. The European Commission, Council of the EU, and European Parliament remained fully operational, with no significant impact on their respective systems. Microsoft's global outage, which began on Thursday, affected services such as Outlook, Teams, and Copilot, causing over 140,000 reports of problems on internet traffic monitoring site Downdetector.

Microsoft stated that malicious activity was not detected and continued to treat the issue with urgency until full mitigation. The European Commission spokesperson, Thomas Regnier, confirmed that the impact on their operations was minor, affecting only a limited number of applications like SharePoint, which experienced slowness.

Similarly, the Council of the EU and the Parliament's press service reported that they were unaffected by the outage, with Outlook and Teams working as usual. The incident highlights the reliance of companies and governments on Microsoft services, a concern that has been echoed in Europe for the need to boost tech sovereignty. In response to similar outages, such as a 2022 Amazon Web Services disruption, European governments have launched initiatives to promote local competitors and build public services on homegrown platforms.

One example is Germany's Schleswig-Holstein state, which moved 40,000 mailboxes from Microsoft Exchange and Outlook to open-source alternatives to reduce reliance on U.S. tech. Local officials emphasize the importance of being able to intervene swiftly in case of disruptions, regardless of whether one uses open-source software or products from individual providers.