EU mulls DMA oversight for AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud after outages

Tech giants Amazon, Microsoft and Google could soon feel pressure from the European Union: according to Bloomberg, regulators are preparing a sweeping review of the cloud-computing market and are weighing whether to apply the EU’s tough Digital Markets Act (DMA) to the three largest platforms. It would be the first time the law reaches beyond classic consumer-facing platforms to the infrastructure providers that power them.

Sources say the European Commission is examining whether Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud should face a broader set of obligations, even though their core customers are corporate clients and the number of end users is difficult to quantify. That audience metric has so far helped the cloud leaders stay outside the DMA’s direct line of fire.

Yet a string of high-profile, prolonged outages—from a 15-hour AWS collapse that affected Apple, McDonald’s and Epic Games to recent critical incidents on Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud—has highlighted how risky it can be when a handful of companies dominate the backbone of digital services. Brussels worries about systemic dependence on a narrow pool of providers and is ready to revisit who qualifies for the regime.

Potential DMA duties for cloud firms could include mandatory interoperability with rival software, simpler data portability for customers, and a ban on aggressively pushing their own products and services. If the Commission concludes the rules are being breached, penalties could run into the hundreds of millions of euros, as Apple’s experience already shows.

There is no formal decision yet, but the direction of travel is hard to miss: for the first time, the EU appears poised to apply its toughest digital rules to the very foundations of global IT infrastructure. For an industry built on resilience and uptime, even the hint of that shift is likely to concentrate minds.