Europe unveils anti-kill switch technology stack as tensions with the US rise

European companies have launched a disaster recovery pack to ensure organizations can continue critical work in the event of a foreign vendor’s “kill switch.”

Italy’s Cubbit and Elemento, Germany-based SUSE, and Bulgaria’s StorPool Storage announced the launch of a joint sovereign “Disaster Recovery Pack” at the European Data Summit of the Konrad-Adenauer-Foundation in Berlin on April 15th, 2026.

The Pack bundles together European components covering storage, compute, orchestration, networking, identity, observability, and management into a single deployable stack, according to the European Digital SME Alliance.

Organizations can use the solution to identify critical services, build and validate a sovereign recovery setup, and progressively extend it across additional workloads.

Sebastiano Toffaletti, secretary general of the European DIGITAL SME Alliance, says the initiative sends a message that European technology companies are capable of building sovereign products and integrating them into “complete and deployable solutions.”

“What is now needed is for EU policymakers to match this momentum with concrete demand-side policies that give European solutions the space to compete, grow, and scale,” Toffaletti says in a press release.

The initiative comes as Europeans are increasingly worried about their technological dependence on other countries, particularly the United States under the Donald Trump administration.

For example, three US giants, Google, AWS, and Microsoft, account for about 70% of the cloud market in Europe. The continent’s banks overwhelmingly rely on Visa and Mastercard, American payment processing networks.

What is now needed is for EU policymakers to match this momentum with concrete demand-side policies that give European solutions the space to compete, grow, and scale.

Sebastiano Toffaletti

As a result, Europeans are actively looking for alternatives to US tech. Dutch companies have recently signed a landmark agreement aimed at strengthening their position against US cloud giants in competition for government contracts.

Meanwhile, governments and enterprises are switching from American proprietary software to open-source alternatives.

Is a US “kill switch” possible?

Europeans have been increasingly voicing concerns about the US technology having a “kill switch,” or a mechanism installed by a producer to shut down or disable a device or program.

In 2025, Spain abandoned its plans to purchase US-made F-35 fighter jets amid rumors that a “kill switch” was embedded in them, allegations the Pentagon denied.

Many experts are also skeptical about a scenario in which Europeans wake up to find their access to all American technologies severed. After all, Europe is a large and lucrative market for US big tech companies.

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Trevor H. Rudolph, a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council's GeoTech Center, argues that the likelihood of a US president unilaterally terminating access to US tech remains remote, as it could erode the dominant position of American technology in Europe.

However, in his article for Tech Policy Press, Rudolph argues that the Trump administration could, at least in the short term, terminate European access to US cloud-based services by using statutory authorities and policy tools at the president’s disposal.

​But it is not only the US that Europe is dependent on. Last year, hidden “kill switches” were discovered in solar panel power inverters produced by Chinese companies and sold to the US.

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