Microsoft outage live updates: Services including Outlook down globally

The Microsoft outage comes at a time when Europe is pushing for greater tech sovereignty, aiming to run its own servers and reduce dependency on foreign providers.

Europe lacks the kind of mega tech companies that abound in the US, making it reliant on American firms for its digital services, but there is sentiment in Europe that it should become less reliant on the United States for its tech needs.

That sentiment has hardened during US President Donald Trump’s second term, when he has hit the continent with huge tariffs and threatened to take over the Danish territory of Greenland.

Earlier this year French Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu said that government officials will ditch Zoom and other US-owned video conferencing tools and begin using French-owned software. The decision is intended partly to reduce “dependencies on non-European actors,” Lecornu said.

“The internet in Europe is essentially a US construct, a US system. And Europe doesn’t really have a competitor to any of that,” Neil Shearing, group chief economist at Capital Economics, told CNN earlier this year.

On Friday, that question resurfaced as Microsoft’s outage stretched beyond 12 hours, disrupting countries across the globe.

“That tech sovereignty conversation, while it’s been mostly political, I bet it’s real sharp today,” technology journalist and founder of The Rip Current podcast Jacob Ward told CNN.

“I think it is probably, for everybody, a wake up call about just how vulnerable we can be, even as we enjoy the convenience of these cloud systems.”

Anna Cooban contributed reporting.