This article was originally published in Tribune Magazine and is part of Alameda ‘After Orders’ project

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Amazon and Microsoft’s cloud blackouts paralysed public services across the globe this autumn — a warning of what happens when essential infrastructure is left in the hands of private US monopolies.

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How do you feel when you try to check your messages, but they are not refreshing, and you realise that there is a problem with the app? Or when you check a website only to find strange server errors accompanied by numbers such as 500, 501, or 503? Now imagine that the same happens to thousands of websites around the world, hospitals, schools, businesses of all kinds, and public sector services responsible for collecting taxes and issuing benefits. This may sound like the plot of a Black Mirror episode, but it is what happened twice in the space of just ten days, with the Amazon Web Services outage on 20 October 2025 and the Microsoft Azure outage on 29 October 2025, in two of the largest cloud service disruptions in recent years.

While Microsoft’s outage affected mostly the US — impacting, among others, retail companies like Costco and Kroger, Starbucks, and a few airlines — the more severe Amazon Web Services’ failure left individuals and organisations around the world paralysed. Over 2,000 digital services were impacted in a domino effect which severely disrupted the daily activities of millions of people. Besides popular social media platforms such as Snapchat, Reddit, and the gaming platform Fortnite, government services were also hit. In the UK, the Gov.uk government gateway which provides access to all sorts of public services — from tax self-assessment to claiming benefits — was severely impacted: ‘Sorry, there is a problem with the service. Try again later’, was the message that UK residents read again and again until AWS re-established its services.

These two cloud-service failures happening in quick succession are a clear demonstration of the risks behind the extreme concentration of communication infrastructure around a few companies and the urgency of turning ‘digital sovereignty’ from a fashionable yet often empty phrase into a concrete reality. Cloud services form one of the most oligopolistic markets in the world, with over 60 percent of the world market in the hands of just three companies: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. This concentration of services increases the likelihood of ‘single point of failure’ events, in which one technical problem can quickly cascade out of control. For example, in the case of Amazon’s outage, an apparently trivial configuration error in the Domain Name System (DNS) of the US-East-1 data region, led to widespread service disruption.

Besides the negative effects on businesses relying on companies such as Amazon and Microsoft for cloud services, these events have also exposed how much public institutions are also wedded to tech giants. The UK government has spent 1.7 billion pounds on contracts with Amazon’s cloud service. No doubt this was justified at the time based on the fact AWS was considered the cheapest service available. Yet, as we are learning ever more clearly, this convenience comes at enormous long-term costs given its implications not only in terms of IT security but also more broadly for long-term economic and technological subordination.

What is concerning is not just the ever-growing possibility of involuntary technical glitches, but also the intentional weaponisation of digital assets for geopolitical purposes. In 2019 Adobe stopped providing Photoshop service to Venezuela, to abide by US sanctions on the country, while during the war in Ukraine, Musk has often used Starlink access for Kiev’s troops as a means of influence. More recently, Microsoft allegedly disconnected the email of International Criminal Court chief prosecutor Karim Khan, also to comply with US sanctions. While Microsoft has curiously denied that it cut its services, it is significant that in the aftermath of the incident, the company promised that it would include a binding clause in its agreements with European governments and the European Commission, ensuring that it retains the right to take legal action if any government directs it to halt or shut down its cloud services.

This concerning reality should alert European policymakers about the need to take concrete steps to realise their pledge to pursue digital sovereignty. However, to date, in Europe, a continent which is heavily dependent on US digital technology, this phrase is as often repeated as rarely put into practice. Under the leadership of Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission has certainly made digital sovereignty one of its key objectives, in line with the wish of making the European Union ‘more geopolitical’ and affording it greater ‘strategic autonomy’. Yet over this time, overall EU technological dependence has increased.

Even worse, digital sovereignty is now often used to justify policies that are in fact to its detriment. The installation of Big Tech datacentres in Europe and other parts of the world is presented to governments as the installation of sovereign clouds. But none has gone further down this road of misleading rhetoric than the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change. The think-tank has been even described as ‘a tech sales and lobbying operation for Oracle’ given that it is heavily financed by Larry Ellison’s company. Oracle is a company whose main business consists of offering its services on Amazon, Microsoft and Google cloud marketplaces. It is precisely the Tony Blair Institute that is now trying to shape the UK ‘digital sovereignty’ agenda. This very institute has recently authored a much trumpeted report titled Sovereignty, Security, Scale: a UK Strategy for AI Infrastructure. According to it, the greatest share of AI infrastructure supply should come from international partnerships, while what it defines as ‘sovereign AI compute’ should act only as reserve.

Instead of following the prescriptions of organizations funded by the very US multinationals that have consigned the UK and broadly the whole of Europe into the periphery of digital capitalism, the UK government should prioritise the development of an independent ecosystem, one that should be public-led and that should offer foundational technologies as public utilities while developing an alternative cloud marketplace where public agencies and departments could procure. No doubt building such an alternative will be costly and face major political hurdles due to the corporate pushbacks it is likely to elicit, but it can start small. Freeing the NHS from its predatory contracts with Palantir and other Big Tech companies could be a good starting point.