3 in 4 European Businesses Fear a US Tech Kill Switch. Few Have a Plan for It.

A survey published this month by Proton asked 1,500 business leaders across the UK, Germany, and France a blunt question: what happens to your company if your US technology provider switches you off?

The answers should give every European business pause:

• 74% fear a US “kill switch” could disrupt their operations - roughly the same share that fear ransomware or a cyberattack
• 54% say they couldn’t survive more than a single business day without access to US cloud services
• 29% of large businesses expect to lose more than €100,000 from a single day of downtime
• Despite 94% having a business continuity plan on paper, only 34% have any fallback for their most important platform: email

Let that sink in: European businesses now rate the risk of losing access to their own tools and data on par with being attacked by criminals. And most have no plan for it.

Why this fear is no longer theoretical

For years, “what if the provider cuts you off?” was a thought experiment. It isn’t anymore.

In 2025, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court - an institution based in The Hague - lost access to his Microsoft-hosted email after US sanctions were imposed. Whatever your view of the politics, the mechanism was demonstrated in public: access to a US-operated cloud service can be revoked to comply with US policy, regardless of where the customer sits or what European law says.

European businesses run on that same infrastructure. Email, files, calendars, identity, collaboration - for most companies it all lives in Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace. That concentration is exactly what makes the survey numbers so stark: the services are excellent, and the dependency is total.

The uncomfortable truth: you can’t just leave

The instinctive answer - “switch to European alternatives” - is easier said than done. Migrating a company off Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace is a months-to-years project involving retraining, integration rework, and real business risk. For most organisations it isn’t happening this quarter, and pretending otherwise doesn’t reduce the risk.

But there’s a difference between losing access to a service and losing your data. The first is painful. The second can be fatal.

If your provider access disappeared tomorrow - through sanctions, a billing dispute, an account compromise, or a simple administrative error - the question that decides your company’s future is: does an independent copy of your data exist, outside that provider’s control?

For most businesses today, the honest answer is no. Microsoft and Google replicate your data for their resilience, not your independence. A copy that lives inside the same account you just lost access to is not a continuity plan.

The pragmatic first step: an independent, European-held copy

You don’t need to complete a sovereignty migration to close the most dangerous gap. You need an escape hatch for your data:

• A backup held by a European provider, in EU data centres - legally and operationally independent of the hyperscaler you depend on
• Covering everything that matters: mailboxes, files, sites, shared drives - and identity. If you use Microsoft 365, that includes Entra ID, because losing users, groups, and access policies locks you out just as effectively as losing email
• Restorable and exportable on your terms - back into the original service when access returns, or out to standard formats if you decide it’s time to move

That single measure changes the failure mode. A provider cut-off stops being an existential threat to your data and becomes what it should be: a serious but survivable operational problem.

And the same independent copy protects you against the risks the survey ranked alongside the kill switch - ransomware, malicious deletion, and account takeover. One measure, several of your worst days covered.

Where euBackups fits

This scenario is why euBackups exists. We’re a German company, and we back up Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace - plus servers, workstations, and virtual machines - to EU data centres, under European jurisdiction, fully GDPR-compliant.

Your backup runs automatically, is verifiably restorable, and belongs to you. If the worst-case scenario in Proton’s survey ever stops being hypothetical, your data is already somewhere your provider can’t switch off.

Setting it up takes minutes, not months - and every plan starts with a 30-day free trial.

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Survey data from Proton’s business continuity survey of 1,500 business leaders in the UK, Germany, and France, conducted 15-24 July 2026. Additional coverage: The Register, IT Pro.