—By Raphaël Auphan, COO, Proton—
Earlier this week, a Google Cloud failure took out a surprising range of everyday services across the UK and Europe, hitting everything from customer payments to courier networks. Most people would never have connected these services to each other. The link only became visible when the company underneath them went down.
That is the uncomfortable truth for any business built on the cloud. For a hyperscaler, an outage is a blip in the statistics. For a company that runs entirely on its infrastructure, it means zero revenue, zero service and a lot of angry customers.
The Ripple Effect
Household names were hit. Revolut, Halifax, Lloyds and even the Ministry of Justice all reported problems. Smaller businesses felt it too: hospitality venues closed early, patients couldn’t book appointments, and transactions stalled.
Coming just a year after the AWS outage, the pattern can no longer be ignored. Outages will always happen. The real risk is how concentrated the market has become, with Google, AWS and Azure underpinning almost everything in the UK and Europe. When one of them fails, everyone who depends on it fails at the same time.
Most Businesses Can’t Ride It Out
Many startups begin on hyperscalers’ free credits. What may seem a sensible way to start builds dependency from the get-go, and it gets harder to unwind the longer it continues. The question isn’t whether to use the big three, it’s whether you could leave if you needed to.
For smaller and younger companies, the stakes are higher still. Proton’s research shows that 54% of European businesses couldn’t last more than a single day before shutting down services until their tools came back online. Startups with thin margins and no spare infrastructure are often in the most fragile position.
It’s Not Only About Accidents
Beyond technical failure, there is a sovereignty question. If your critical systems sit with a provider governed by another jurisdiction, access could be restricted on purpose, by the provider itself or because a foreign government demands it. Either way, you are not in control of your own continuity.
Even your inbox is part of this. According to Proton’s Tech Watch research, 74% of Europe’s publicly listed companies use US email services. In the UK, it’s 88%.
A Three-Step Resilience Checklist
- Map your dependencies. List your critical functions, such as payments, email, hosting and customer support, and note which provider each one relies on. Ask honestly whether the business could keep going if that provider disappeared for a day, or even an hour.
- Set up a plan B. Choose fallback suppliers in advance and get them ready, so you can switch immediately rather than scrambling mid-outage. These fallbacks should ideally have a separate governing jurisdiction to your main supplier.
- Test it. Run the switchover before you need it. A backup you’ve never tested isn’t really a backup.
An Opportunity For European Tech
There is a bigger picture here, and it should interest anyone building a tech company in Europe. 80% of business spending on cloud software and services in Europe goes to US firms, over €265 billion every year. That is a huge amount of value flowing out of the European ecosystem, and in effect funding the competition. Meanwhile more and more European buyers are asking where their data lives, and which laws protect it. If you can answer that clearly, it’s a huge advantage.
Digital sovereignty isn’t about shutting anyone out. It’s about giving businesses a genuine choice over where their data lives and which laws protect it. If organisations and policymakers start treating European alternatives as an investment rather than a cost, that money can build a stronger, more competitive and more resilient European tech sector, one accountable to European law.
Your customers won’t care whose cloud failed. They’ll just remember your business was down.
