BRUSSELS — The European Union institutions kept calm and carried on regulating on Friday, as many other parts of the world muttered at their computers over a massive digital outage at U.S. tech leader Microsoft.
The European Commission, Council of the EU and European Parliament were able to carry on business as usual, with systems remaining largely unaffected.
Microsoft’s global outage, which disrupted Outlook, Teams and Copilot started on Thursday, with internet traffic monitoring site Downdetector reporting issues in at least 74 countries. The tracker logged nearly 140,000 reports of Outlook problems at its peak.
Microsoft on Friday morning said recovery was still uneven. “At this time, we have no evidence of malicious activity associated with this incident. We will continue to treat this with urgency until full mitigation,” it said.
At the European Commission “the impact … is very limited and does not affect our operations,” spokesperson Thomas Regnier told POLITICO. He said the outage had a “minor impact on a limited number of applications, such as the slowness of SharePoint.” Outlook and Teams were “fully operational,” Regnier said.
The Council of the EU, which gathers representatives of national governments, also carried on work: Outlook and Teams were “working on our side,” a Council official told POLITICO, declining to give more details on the institution’s IT setup.
The Parliament’s press service said in a statement to POLITICO that it was unaffected and was monitoring the situation as a precaution.
The outage is exposing the reliance of companies and governments on Microsoft services — an issue that has also been a longstanding concern in Europe among proponents of keeping more control over IT and digital infrastructure.
In October last year, a similar outage of Amazon Web Services servers prompted immediate calls for Europe to boost its tech sovereignty.
Efforts to move away from American tech providers got a boost in the past two years due to concerns that the U.S. administration of Donald Trump could disrupt digital services in Europe for political gain. Governments across Europe have launched a wide range of initiatives to boost local competitors to U.S. Big Tech and build public services on homegrown platforms.
One example is the government of Germany’s northernmost state of Schleswig-Holstein, which in 2025 moved about 40,000 mailboxes from Microsoft Exchange and Outlook to open-source alternatives to reduce their reliance on U.S. tech.
The state’s digitalization minister, Dirk Schrödter, said in a comment to POLITICO on Friday that disruptions like the Microsoft outage “must be taken very seriously,” whether the state uses open-source software or products from individual providers. “We must be able to intervene ourselves at any time if problems arise,” he said.
Francesca Micheletti contributed to this report.