The Microsoft 365 outage demonstrates just how exposed nations are when they are reliant upon a vendor-controlled and managed solution.
During three relatively benign decades, and the rise of SaaS, governments were lulled into relying on such systems. It was seen as cheaper and easier. But in a considerably different geopolitical climate, there’s a growing realisation that the centralised design of vendor-controlled systems makes nations weak.
Europe’s determination to achieve tech sovereignty has been building for many years. The current outage is one of the many reasons, along with similar examples such as last year's AWS outage that made Signal and many others unavailable.
While the current outage appears to be accidental, imagine if it weren’t. Imagine a vendor-controlled SaaS, Microsoft 365 or any other, deliberately deplatforming a nation or entire region.
We’ve already seen vendors acting under, or citing, government direction to do exactly that: Starlink throttling its service to Ukraine, a US government order forcing Anthropic to switch off Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5, Maxar Technologies' withdrawal of satellite imagery to Ukraine and the cutting off of the ICC Chief Prosecutor’s Microsoft email account under US sanctions. Or imagine a malicious insider sponsored by a rogue state, deliberately taking down such a system to coincide with terrorist or military activity.
If you don’t have agency over your technology, you’re not in control
Government, defence and public sector organisations must ensure they are not reliant on a vendor for services, particularly something as vital as real time communications.
Governments should be self-hosting their own systems, in partnership with vendors but not reliant upon them. This is perfectly possible through a combination of open source software - ensuring transparency and the ability to bring it in-house should circumstances demand - and open standards - to ensure a competitive and interoperable ecosystem. This is very much the vision behind the Matrix open standard, which is now widely embraced by more than 35 governments around the world.
Particularly advantageous for real time communications, Matrix enables separate deployments - from a range of different vendors and in-house solutions - to federate. That means they can communicate with each other seamlessly through a vendor-agnostic open standard. Free from vendor lock-in, and no single vendor’s outage or decision can take everyone down.
Decentralised sovereign systems make everyone stronger. Like the original internet, a genuinely decentralised system is designed to have no single point of failure.
