Overview
- The Proton survey, published Thursday, August 6, 2026, of 1,500 business leaders across the UK, Germany and France found 73.9% are at least somewhat concerned a US government order could cut their access to US tech providers and that this worry is statistically on par with concern about ransomware.
- More than half of respondents (about 54–54.5%) said their firms could operate for a single business day or less if they lost access to cloud and digital services, leaving little time for failover before core operations stall.
- Preparedness lags awareness: only 44% of businesses have continuity plans that are both documented and regularly tested, while roughly 67.8% say they would switch providers if blocked, implying many would attempt emergency migrations without rehearsed procedures.
- Security experts and Proton describe the threat as jurisdictional, meaning endpoint protection and US-based backups do not remove the risk, and they recommend diversifying to non-US infrastructure and pre-provisioning European failovers such as dormant accounts.
- The human and economic stakes are tangible with nearly one-third of large firms expecting six-figure losses from a single day offline, a dynamic that could accelerate corporate moves to sovereign alternatives and shape EU policy on digital independence.