- AWS outage exposes vulnerabilities in global digital infrastructure
- Industry leaders urge Europe to accelerate moves towards domestic cloud solutions
What happened: AWS outage highlights Europe’s reliance on US cloud giants
Amazon Web Services (AWS) experienced a major global outage on 20 October 2025, primarily affecting its US-EAST-1 region. The disruption, which affected several public-facing applications and platforms, reignited concerns about the fragility of the digital infrastructure that powers much of the world’s online services. Though AWS restored services after a brief downtime, the incident underlined a critical vulnerability: when a dominant cloud provider fails, the effects are immediate, widespread, and hard to mitigate.
This latest disruption comes at a time when businesses and governments are increasingly relying on a handful of large US cloud providers. While the debate about multi-cloud strategies continues, this outage raised pressing questions about Europe’s dependency on foreign technology giants, especially given the lack of sovereign alternatives.
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Why it’s important
The outage has fuelled a growing debate about Europe’s digital sovereignty. Mark Boost, CEO of Civo, warns that Europe’s dependence on US cloud providers risks eroding its control over its own digital future. Boost calls for a shift towards domestically governed cloud services, with EU governments incentivising sovereign infrastructure to ensure resilience and reduce reliance on external players.
Jake Madders, co-founder of Hyve Managed Hosting, also highlights that resilience in IT infrastructure is a critical operational imperative. He suggests that businesses should diversify across multiple cloud providers and regions to reduce the risks associated with single-provider reliance.
The European market remains heavily controlled by US giants, a situation Nicky Stewart from the Open Cloud Coalition calls a “systemic flaw.” She argues that the cloud market needs to be more competitive and interoperable, to avoid scenarios where a single provider can disrupt so much of Europe’s digital infrastructure.
In response, European regulators are intensifying scrutiny on cloud pricing, lock-in practices, and interoperability, while sovereign cloud initiatives are gaining momentum. However, critics argue that progress remains too slow to meet the growing demands for security and autonomy.
As Europe grapples with its digital future, the AWS outage serves as a stark reminder that resilience, sovereignty, and genuine competition are crucial to avoiding future disruptions.
