Microsoft’s discontinuation comes at a time when Europe is pushing for greater technological sovereignty, aiming to run its own servers and reduce dependence on foreign suppliers. Europe lacks the kind of mega tech companies that abound in the United States, making it dependent on American companies for its digital services, but there is a feeling in Europe that it should be less dependent on the United States for its technological needs. That sentiment has hardened during US President Donald Trump’s second term, when he hit the continent with huge tariffs and threatened to seize the Danish territory of Greenland. Earlier this year, French Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu said government officials will abandon Zoom and other U.S.-owned video conferencing tools and start using French-owned software. The decision is partly aimed at reducing “reliance on non-European actors,” Lecornu said. “The Internet in Europe is essentially an American construct, an American system. And Europe doesn’t really have a competitor for any of that,” Neil Shearing, chief economist at the Capital Economics group, told CNN earlier this year. On Friday, that question resurfaced when Microsoft’s outage lasted more than 12 hours, disrupting countries around the world. “That conversation about tech sovereignty, while it’s been mostly political, I bet it’s very acute today,” technology journalist and founder of The Rip Current podcast Jacob Ward told CNN. “I think it’s probably, for everyone, a wake-up call about how vulnerable we can be, even when we enjoy the convenience of these cloud systems.” CNN’s Anna Cooban contributed reporting.
