Question to the Department for Business and Trade:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business and Trade, what steps his Department is taking to increase interoperability and competitiveness in the domestic cloud market following recent widespread outages caused by dominant providers in the industry.

In July 2025, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) published its final report on the UK cloud market. The key recommendation was for the CMA Board to prioritise commencing investigations under the digital markets regime and to consider designating the two largest providers —Microsoft and AWS — with strategic market status in relation to cloud services. The CMA is independent of Government and any decisions on initiating strategic market status investigations are for the CMA Board.