Amazon outage exposes EU’s heavy dependence on U.S. cloud providers

A recent Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage disrupted apps, banks, and platforms worldwide — a reminder of how deeply global systems rely on a handful of U.S. cloud providers. Though quickly resolved, the incident highlighted how data infrastructure has become a new form of geopolitical leverage.

Source  Financial Times

The article warns that a future U.S. administration could weaponize cloud access, restricting data availability to foreign economies or industries — much as tariffs have been used in trade wars. AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud together now control nearly two-thirds of global cloud capacity, leaving Europe critically exposed.

The EU’s attempt to build a “European sovereign cloud” has made little progress, with local providers holding just 15% of the market. Until Europe builds its own cloud infrastructure, analysts say, it will remain dependent on U.S. firms — and vulnerable to political manipulation from Washington.