The EU's Backup for Microsoft Teams Is Getting Poor Reviews From Its Own Staff

Brussels has spent the past year reducing how much of its daily work depends on American cloud providers. The Commission put forward its technology sovereignty package on 3 June 2026, and over the summer it deployed a self-hosted alternative for internal messaging. Teams stayed in place as the main platform. Element Pro was installed alongside it.

The tool is built on Matrix, an open protocol for decentralised chat, and developed by Element, a British company. The same underlying software is used by the United Nations and NATO, according to Element's chief executive Matthew Hodgson. On Commission machines it runs entirely on the Commission's own infrastructure, not on external cloud servers.

What staff wrote on the internal boards

Screenshots of internal message boards, reported by Cybernews, show four detailed comments from officials. Three of them questioned the tool's functionality or its value. One defended self-hosting over Microsoft's cloud as the safer setup.

Three officials also challenged the reasoning behind the deployment itself. One wrote that if Washington ever disabled access to its technologies, the United States would "instantly win the war". Another gave a verdict that reporters cleaned up to "absolute s**t". These were people comparing an early rollout of a secondary tool with a product they use every day and know well.

Hodgson has acknowledged that the early rollout was rough. He did not dispute that users ran into problems, and pointed to the software's record elsewhere rather than to the Commission's own experience.

Where the data sits

The sovereignty argument for Element Pro is not about who wrote the code. Matrix is open source and anyone can run it. The argument is about where messages live. Everything on the Commission's instance stays on the Commission's own servers, inside the EU, under European rules. No American provider sits in the chain, so no US court order reaches a company that is not holding the data.

That matters because of the US CLOUD Act, which allows American authorities to compel US-based providers to hand over data even when it is stored abroad. For an EU institution this is a legal risk rather than a technical one. Under the GDPR, public bodies and companies that pass personal data to providers subject to US law need a defensible legal basis, and the paperwork is rarely simple. Self-hosting removes the question instead of answering it.

The bill for self-hosting

Running your own chat service shifts work in-house. Someone has to patch servers, manage accounts, keep the mobile apps working and handle outages. Feature releases arrive on the schedule of an open-source project rather than a commercial vendor with a sales team. Users notice the difference most in the first weeks, which is exactly when a trial gets judged.

That does not make the criticism wrong. A backup that staff avoid using is a weak backup, because in an emergency nobody has practice with it. Teams remains the Commission's primary internal platform, and the Commission has described Element Pro as a continuity tool rather than a replacement.

A British company, European hosting

Element is not an EU vendor. The company is based in the United Kingdom, outside the bloc since Brexit. What Brussels controls is the deployment: the servers, the accounts and the message history. Sovereignty here means the data, not the passport of the supplier.

The episode also shows how European alternatives get judged in practice. Staff compared a young, self-hosted product with a mature one they had used for years and had no reason to leave. That comparison will keep repeating across public administrations as more sovereign tools arrive. It will not be settled by procurement documents. It gets settled by whether someone can find a file, start a call and share a screen without asking a colleague for help.