Microsoft outage renews European calls to detox from US tech

DUBLIN — Friday’s widespread outage of Microsoft products has sparked a new wave of calls for Europe to control its own digital infrastructure — especially with the uncertain future of artificial intelligence at stake. “Only 20% of European digital services run on European infrastructure,” Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch said in remarks Friday after he addressed EU national leaders during their first-ever meeting on artificial intelligence in Dublin. The money spent on foreign, U.S.

or Chinese, technology “could be reinvested here, on infrastructure we control and [to] finance European research and development,” said the boss of Europe’s leading AI frontier lab. Mensch didn’t specifically address the Microsoft outage, which lasted nearly 24 hours and affected millions of users in 74 countries. Still, the shutdown of key tools like Outlook email and Teams messaging impacted plenty of the tech and government leaders gathered in Dublin to chart Europe’s AI future.

French President Emmanuel Macron closed the day with a post on X : “Our independence cannot be outsourced.