A major outage of Amazon Web Services servers affecting multiple websites Monday morning prompted immediate calls for Europe to boost its tech sovereignty.
Slack, Snapchat, Signal and Perplexity were among the affected sites. Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers cloud servers that allow these services and millions of other websites and platforms to run.
Brussels is in the midst of a debate on how to achieve digital sovereignty, and what that means exactly, with cloud services at the center of the conversation. EU leaders are expected to take a position during a high-level summit meeting later this week.
“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.
Transcription service Trint said in an email that it had experienced disruption but “customers on our EU servers should be largely unaffected.”
In a statement shared with media outlets, Amazon Web Services said: “We continue to observe recovery across most of the affected AWS Services. We can confirm global services and features that rely on US-EAST-1 have also recovered. We continue to work towards full resolution and will provide updates as we have more information to share.”
Asked at a briefing of reporters in Brussels on Monday, European Commission spokesperson Markus Lammert said the outage “would be a question for the companies, this is not for us to comment on.”
With regard to how it had affected the Commission’s own operations, Paula Pinho, chief spokesperson for the European Commission, said: “We were more using for instance e-mails. We go back to our traditional methods.”
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