AWS outage and data sovereignty

Monday morning before yesterday, 8:30 am. I open my laptop and some things don’t work. No Canva, no Perplexity, no Fortnite (for the son). The AWS outage has struck again. For many organizations, this means downtime. No communication with donors, no campaigning, no aid.

The real problem is not the failure itself. Technology can go on strike, that’s part of it. The problem is the dependency. When a third of the global cloud market is in the hands of AWS, a technical problem in Virginia becomes a global emergency. Banks, government agencies, NGOs – all affected because we have put our most valuable resource, our data, in the hands of a few US hyperscalers. What’s more, AWS dominance is also reflected in high oligopoly costs, which have given AWS an operating profit of almost $40 billion in 2024.

At nowtec solutions AG, I see NGOs struggling with this challenge every day. They want to pursue their mission, help people, change the world – but they are trapped in a tech stack that makes them dependent. And not just technically: the US CLOUD Act gives American authorities access to data, even if it is located in European data centers. For organizations that work with sensitive information – human rights organizations, whistleblower platforms, health NGOs – this is a massive risk.

From my three decades between activism and tech entrepreneurship, I know that real sovereignty does not come from lip service, but from conscious decisions. A multi-cloud strategy, European providers, open source solutions – these are no longer nice-to-haves. This is the basis for digital resilience and the ability to remain capable of acting even in crises.

How do you deal with (US) cloud dependency? Do you have a plan B if your main provider goes down?