Microsoft is struggling to fix access to its services after a tech outage left people around the world without access – and a British businessman says this highlights why the UK should look to adopt sovereign platforms.
Apps including Outlook, Teams, Sharepoint, Word, Excel and PowerPoint were affected, as well as AI assistant Copilot. Even Anthropic’s AI chatbot Claude has gone down after problems with its connectors to Microsoft servers.
Microsoft and AWS now control 70%-80% of the UK public cloud market – and that’s a recipe for disaster, says Mark Boost, co-founder and CEO of Civo, a hosting provider based in London.
“Once again, a single provider’s outage has disrupted daily life across the UK,” said Boost, who has long campaigned for Britain to pursue a sovereign tech future.
“With Microsoft’s fixes not working as expected, police forces have asked people to phone rather than report crimes online, GP surgeries have struggled with appointments, and schools and councils have lost email.
“Outages happen to every provider. The real problem is how much of our public services now depends on just one or two US hyperscalers.
“When the same company runs the cloud, email, documents and collaboration tools, a single failure takes everything down together. And with licensing and proprietary formats making switching close to impossible, organisations have little choice but to wait.
“That’s the sovereignty tax in action: the quantifiable financial, operational, and strategic penalty that organisations are paying for blindly relying on foreign cloud infrastructure, instead of maintaining digital autonomy.
“True resilience can’t rest on a single point of failure. It needs a hybrid approach, spreading critical services across public cloud, private cloud and on-premise infrastructure, built on open standards and including capacity under UK control.
A Microsoft spokesperson said there was “no indication of a cyber-attack” as users were denied access to some of these services for several hours on Thursday and into Friday.
The tech giant said some of its servers were not performing as expected after an update. It has tried multiple approaches to bring back the services, including rolling back updates and limiting traffic to the affected servers.
However they became unavailable again once traffic returned.
Boost continued: “Our European neighbours are already moving: the French government is replacing Teams and Zoom with its own platform, and parts of Germany’s public sector are switching to open-source tools.
“The UK has the talent and homegrown providers to do the same. What’s needed now is the procurement bravery to back them.”