@Em0nM4stodon Hungary would descend into chaos within hours. Without US BigTech, we're fucked.

We're also jumping on the AI gigafactory trainwreck to make it worse, because why the hell not.

@Em0nM4stodon
That would be bad, but not quite as immediately catastrophic as if mainframes disappeared.

@Em0nM4stodon

Situation here (Germany / Schleswig Holstein) is mixed. The federal government would be crippled. The state government of Schleswig Holstein already migrated the backend stuff to FOSS (Linux + OpenXChange) and is in the middle of migrating all the desktops to FOSS.

Publicly operated hospitals still are dependent on MS stuff, but that's two fold: PACS and diagnostic devices. The PACS system backend is moving toward FOSS, desktops are Windows.

@Em0nM4stodon
Call me paranoid, but I live in the continental US, and still worry about those things. The Trump administration classifies plenty of US citizens and legal residents as enemies and terrorists (eg Antifa), and could shut off our access to big tech easily.
I use Linux and LibreOffice, and although I do use some cloud storage, all of my important data is on my own file server.
Of US big tech, losing Google would likely affect me most, but it wouldn't be that big a disaster for me.

@Em0nM4stodon A French newspaper has an interesting "what if" piece of fiction about this https://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/2026/04/LAMBERT/69457. Unfortunately it has a French, Portuguese, Spanish, Russian and Arabic version, but not English.

@Em0nM4stodon Germany would simply continue conducting business via fax.

@Em0nM4stodon
Oh, we had this discussion at work last week when someone asked why I want to host a dadabase on premise and not in the MS Azure cloud. And I replied that the service gets disrupted if Microsoft cuts their service to us by requirement of the gouvernment (I might have used the term "Orange Shitshow" instead).

The reply was: "If Microsoft cuts its services to us, nothing will work anymore anyway."

And I followed up: "That's true for your services. Mine all run on linux and on prem for a reason."

@Em0nM4stodon If we do in Australia, it's not public, and I'd be pleasantly shocked if ASIO was even talking about it behind closed doors. There was a tiny little indication of awareness a couple of months ago:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-06-11/spacex-risk-elon-musk-starlink-satellite-regulation/106779898

@Em0nM4stodon i've had lots of eye rolling in response to my bringing it up at work, only kinda now am i being half taken seriously 🤨

@Em0nM4stodon no microsoft means no GitHub, no npm of course.

@Em0nM4stodon But they can't! All our Azure resources are in "North Europe". It will be fine.

@Em0nM4stodon

I think hospitals in my current country of residence would be mostly fine.
The rest, however...

If Microsoft/Azure, AWS, Google and (not to be forgotten!) Cloudflare went out overnight, it would be a major catastrophe.
There's lots of talk about so called "digital sovereignty", but it's mostly lip service.

@Em0nM4stodon we all need to switch to FOSS systems. We should have done so already.

@Em0nM4stodon

The Only plan we have in France is a "tall free number".

For any crisis.

😑

@Em0nM4stodon hahaha. No one is ready enough. If that happens we are all fucked. Back to the stone age.

@Em0nM4stodon

Americans should be aware of this as well, on a personal level. There's no reason to think it won't be individualized against non-nazi Yankees.

@Em0nM4stodon Germany. Sure as hell they don't. Especially companies.
I mean, some states/cities decided to move to Linux/LibreOffice. That's a good thing.
But the company I work at? Omg, Microsoft, Exchange, Jira, Confluence, Miro. I kinda look forward to the chaos that would ensue if that happened.

@Em0nM4stodon @chu When I was warning about this many years ago, people called me naive, stupid and told me the world doesn’t work that way and I just hate Microsoft (which I do).

@Em0nM4stodon my work would stay on (and maybe increase) - the rest is fucked.

@Em0nM4stodon Large parts of germany will be doomed.

@Em0nM4stodon My current employee uses M$ and GMail services. As an ex-IT Consultant, I have the know how to assist in keeping this business going if this becomes reality. Will it? I'm not sure. Thing is, I'm not sure any other employee of this company would know how to make the transition, other than, Apple is an option. I'm not sure how much money this business makes, but I don't see Mac computers in its future. Anyway, I'll help out if and when the time comes, as long as I keep working here.

@Em0nM4stodon If you could ride it out, it would probably be the start of the end of the US economy - everyone would suffer, but the US stock market would lose an astounding amount of value.

I'd be far more worried overall that one or more of the cloud providers is irreparably damaged by a hostile actor, and nobody, for want of anything, can bring it back up.

@Em0nM4stodon I would be very Happy is US does that, at least my people will learn some software technology

@Em0nM4stodon my employer is an MSP that's does work for public and private sector across Australia. I'm confident that if just access to m365 was withdrawn that my local state would implode.

Oh and I'd not be able to submit my timesheets (because Entra id auth).

@Em0nM4stodon I think more concerning would be the cut-off from VISA etc. I doubt that non-US banks will be able to provide an alternative in due time if that happened.

I personally wouldn't have problems being cut off from these software companies. There are many alternatives out there.
Except for Windows itself i don't intentionally use any services of said companies. I would guess that many companies would be in serious trouble because they have no exit strategy from these cloud providers.

@Em0nM4stodon thankfully the brains trust put a lot of thought and hard work into this and made the hard call to stick with the full stack of US vendors.

... we just pay extra money to microsoft/aws/salesforce to use instances hosted in australia.

* problem solved *

:\

@Em0nM4stodon My company steadfastly refuses (so far) to use hyperscalers for our core business. This is not to say we don't have some important things in AWS - but it would be more of a "grit teeth and deal with it" issue than the end of the business.

But that's the Core. Like practically every other business here we're O365 and the way MS shoves OneDrive down your damn throat in such a way as to make every other storage location practically unusable means that a looooooot of documentation exists solely there.

We'd still be mostly on the air but probably cut off from a lot of our own documentation.

@Em0nM4stodon Fully? No. Partially? Yes. My work would do fine though.

@Em0nM4stodon Don't forget to include Starlink in your list.

@Em0nM4stodon
Actually, it's more than just a Windows and Google thing - it's about AI. If Artificial Intelligence starts getting out of control and starts heading down Terminator Road, one of the first defenses would be to shut down the internet world-wide.
Alternatively, if AI goes rogue one of its first actions against humanity would be to shut down the internet.
Either way, it doesn't look good . . .

@Em0nM4stodon
My adopted country (Philippines) would die on its arse. Google is everywhere in large companies, Facebook is everywhere in small companies. Microsoft probably less of a problem because almost every copy of Windows and Office is almost certainly pirated.

@Em0nM4stodon

Maybe this would be a good thing, to give people the push they need to stop using those and move to better alternatives.

In my personal life, I don't depend on any of those. But I would be impacted as my employer depend on those. At the same time, I see more job opportunities outside the US if this ever happens.

@Em0nM4stodon My workplace would fall apart completely if either Google or Microsoft went away. Billion-dollar corporation in Australia.

@Em0nM4stodon What will happen (long term) is that trumpista arrogance will marginalize the U.S., which has historically received significant benefits for being viewed as a stable and trustworthy country with respect to finances, etc. This won't happen overnight but I imagine that everyone is nervous and are planning how to limit any dependency on the U.S. You'll probably see a migration from Windows or MacOS to Linux, just to limit exposure.

@Em0nM4stodon successfully migrated our UK based workers' co-op from Google Workspace to Infomaniak's ksuite (Swiss based) earlier this year and we're much happier (plus our bill is waaay lower). The ksuite also replaces Slack and Zoom, so more services for less money and all encrypted.
Our website is hosted independently in the UK. Newsletter is with EmailOctopus, a UK company.
Won't be sad if we lose Instagram tbh.
I guess we might be impacted indirectly if payment processors like PayPal and Stripe go down but we could find a work around.
Of course, these are all small business solutions and should be separated from personal or activist ones.

@Em0nM4stodon no. my country would be *fucked*. NZ exists entirely on O365, AWS, and Google apps. Why? Because NZ is terrified, legitimately fearful in some ways, of the idea of running servers onsite

@Em0nM4stodon We're safe here in the UK, as our government will happily cave in to any demand from the trump clown circus, (aka the administration).

@Em0nM4stodon ... I'd be very, very, *VERY* tired, but happy.

@FreakyFwoof @Em0nM4stodon lol. If the EU keeps this up, no tech company will wanna sell there either. P.S. Joking don't worry. would never happen.

@Em0nM4stodon all i can say to that question is that when i was working and it was in the banking industry all of this had been thought of and that was years ago. it's why all our cloud hosting was done outside the us.

@Em0nM4stodon

Not really. Europe has realized their massive digital dependency from the US too late and now the plan is basically: "let's keep licking Trump's balls and hope he doesn't cut us off".

@Em0nM4stodon paranoia.

@Em0nM4stodon my guess is only Russia, China, North Korea, Iran and Cuba may have that.
That kind of puts in perspective the concept of freedom we generally use.

@Em0nM4stodon

The same questions apply even inside the US.

What if the entire Microsoft cloud failed?

@Em0nM4stodon it is not.
- Like not at all!

@Em0nM4stodon I would feel the impact personally as I'm dependent on Google, but I try to decrease this. For work I would be mostly fine but our customers are dependent on Microsoft and Amazon and some of there services they get from as are connected to azure and co. So there will be an impact. Also I don't know about the dependencies the Datacenter and power companies have. Electricity is very important. So the impact will be at least indirectly.

@Em0nM4stodon have you ever heard of ISDS (investor state dispute settlement)?

⬆️ @Em0nM4stodon

>> If you live outside of the #UnitedStates, do you know if your country has a plan if the #US government decided to cut access to #Google, #Microsoft, and #Amazon products overnight?

What better way to nuke the #tech #broligarch cartel in the US swiftly and for good? Go for it #USA.

@Em0nM4stodon Thanks @Em0nM4stodon I'm reading this at 23:20 and now mixing all of this into the usual how to sleep soundly type thoughts.

Stuff it, I know a nice dry cave that I could happily live in. On fact, I may go and have a look tomorrow anyway.