The EU Commission is expected to announce the preliminary results of its investigation into US cloud providers under the Digital Markets Act (DMA) next week, according to insider sources. Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft's Azure are reportedly to be classified as gatekeepers, subjecting these cloud services to stricter rules in the European Union (EU). The final decision on this DMA assessment is expected by the end of 2026.
This investigation began in November 2025, when the EU targeted the cloud power of US tech giants. The trigger was outages in cloud services with sometimes significant impacts on other internet services. Shortly before, an approximately 15-hour outage of the AWS cloud in the US meant that not only Amazon's own streaming services but also Atlassian, Docker, Epic Games, and the Signal messenger were unavailable or severely restricted. Shortly thereafter, Microsoft Azure also struggled with an outage, preventing air passengers from checking in and interrupting votes in the Scottish Parliament.
As a result, European antitrust authorities have also scrutinized cloud services under the Digital Markets Act for the first time. The major cloud providers, primarily from the US, have so far evaded the EU's Digital Markets Act because a large part of their business is handled through corporate contracts. This makes it difficult to determine the number of individual users. However, this is one of the EU's most important criteria for determining the market power of companies.
