“Today’s outage shows how concentrated power makes the internet fragile and this lack of resilience hits our economies as a result,” technologist Robin Berjon said in an email. Berjon co-founded the Eurostack project — an initiative campaigning to make Europe self-reliant in digital services.
“Europe’s dependency on monopoly cloud companies like Amazon is a security vulnerability and an economic threat we can’t ignore,” Cori Crider, executive director of the Future of Technology Institute, said in an email.
According to AWS’s health dashboard, which shows a “running log of AWS service interruptions for the past 12 months,” the outage originated with servers in North America and specifically Virginia.
That prompted reaction including from Ulrike Franke, senior fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations: “My robot vacuum cleaner no longer works and can someone explain why a robot in Paris is linked to U.S. East? Talk about European digital sovereignty…” she posted on Bluesky.
“These disruptions are not just technical issues, they’re democratic failures,” said Corinne Cath-Speth, head of digital at civil society group Article 19. “When a single provider goes dark, critical services go offline with it — media outlets become inaccessible, secure communication apps like Signal stop functioning, and the infrastructure that serves our digital society crumbles.”
“We urgently need diversification in cloud computing,” she added.