After an Amazon Web Services Outage, Europe Revives the Debate on Digital Sovereignty

A major outage of Amazon Web Services on Monday morning, which disrupted numerous websites, has renewed calls in Europe to strengthen technological sovereignty.

Slack, Snapchat, Signal, and Perplexity were among the affected platforms. Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides the cloud infrastructure that powers these and millions of other sites. While debates in Brussels continue over what exactly “digital sovereignty” means and how to achieve it, the issue of cloud services has moved to the center of the discussion. EU leaders are expected to address it at a summit later this week.

“Today’s outage shows how the concentration of computing power makes the internet fragile, and how a lack of resilience hits our economies,” said technology expert Robin Berjon, co-founder of Eurostack, an initiative promoting Europe’s digital autonomy. “Europe’s dependence on monopolistic cloud providers like Amazon is both a security vulnerability and an economic risk that can no longer be ignored,” added Cory Crider, executive director of the Institute for the Future of Technology.

According to AWS’s service status dashboard, which tracks outages over the past 12 months, the disruption began on servers in North America—specifically in Virginia. The incident prompted widespread reactions, including from Ulrike Franke, a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations: “My robot vacuum stopped working—can someone explain why a robot in Paris depends on servers in the U.S.? So much for European digital sovereignty,” she wrote on Bluesky.

“Outages like this are not merely technical glitches—they’re democratic failures,” said Corinne Cath-Speth, head of digital policy at the human rights organization Article 19. “When a single provider goes down, vital services go dark along with it: media outlets become inaccessible, secure communication apps like Signal stop working, and the digital backbone of our societies starts to crumble.” She added that “Europe urgently needs a diversity of cloud providers.”

The transcription service Trint reported temporary disruptions but said that “users operating through our European servers were largely unaffected.”

In a statement to the media, Amazon Web Services said: “We are seeing recovery across most affected AWS services. Global systems and functions dependent on the US-EAST-1 region have also been restored. We continue to work on full remediation and will provide updates as more information becomes available.”

At a press briefing in Brussels, European Commission spokesperson Markus Lammert said the outage “should be regarded as a matter for the companies themselves, and the Commission will not comment on it.” Asked how the situation affected the Commission’s own operations, chief spokesperson Paula Pinho replied: “We used, let’s say, more email. We went back to traditional methods.”