Microsoft outage renews European calls to detox from US tech

DUBLIN — Friday's widespread outage of Microsoft products has sparked a new wave of calls for Europe to control its own digital infrastructure — especially with the uncertain future of artificial intelligence at stake.

"Only 20% of European digital services run on European infrastructure," Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch said in remarks Friday after he addressed EU national leaders during their first-ever meeting on artificial intelligence in Dublin.

The money spent on foreign, U.S. or Chinese, technology "could be reinvested here, on infrastructure we control and [to] finance European research and development," said the boss of Europe's leading AI frontier lab.

Mensch didn't specifically address the Microsoft outage, which lasted nearly 24 hours and affected millions of users in 74 countries. Still, the shutdown of key tools like Outlook email and Teams messaging impacted plenty of the tech and government leaders gathered in Dublin to chart Europe's AI future.

French President Emmanuel Macron closed the day with a post on X: “Our independence cannot be outsourced. It must be built here at home, in Europe,” he wrote. "When it comes to artificial intelligence, too, Europe has everything it takes to compete. We have no time to lose.”

An EU diplomat present at the leaders' talks said that "we need to pick up speed, permitting and investment to compete on the world market, to have sovereignty."

Tech sovereignty, including control over the cloud, chips and models that power AI, has been a rallying cry of the second mandate of European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, and was one of the key agenda items at Friday's gathering of the leaders of the EU's 27 member countries.

"We have outsourced too much of our digital infrastructure to actors outside the EU," Finnish European Parliament lawmaker Aura Salla said in a press release Friday following the outage. She suggested that government contracts specifically "must support European technology."

Others zoned in on the risk created by relying on digital infrastructure controlled by a couple of large companies.

The Microsoft outage is a "reminder of the systemic risk created by concentrating digital infrastructure with a few global tech giants," said Sebastian Toffaletti, secretary general of the Digital SME Alliance, in a statement shared with POLITICO.

In the U.K., the Liberal Democrat party's tech spokesperson Victoria Collins said the outage demonstrated the need for a digital sovereign strategy, saying: “We need urgent action to stop relying on a handful of companies.”

In Germany, lawmaker Johannes Schätzl from the Social Democratic Party said it raised questions about public procurement. “Digital sovereignty must be measured by whether we can remain operational even during outages like this,” he said.

Joe Bambridge and Kilian Hocke contributed reporting.