Infrastructuring Openness or Opening Infrastructures?

In the mid-2020s, a series of infrastructural incidents made visible how deeply public authority, communication, and knowledge circulation have become entangled with privately operated digital infrastructures. Largescale outages of cloud, identity, and content delivery services in 2024 and 2025 disrupted communication in hospitals, airports, courts, universities, and government administrations across multiple world regions. One prominent example is the ‘largest outage in history’ (Milmo et al. 2024) that was caused by the American cybersecurity company CrowdStrike, whose faulty update led to widespread problems with Microsoft Windows computers running the proprietary software worldwide. Patient records became temporarily inaccessible, air traffic systems reverted to manual procedures, and public communication channels failed not because of local malfunction, but because shared infrastructural layers ceased to operate. What appeared as technical disruption revealed a structural condition: essential public functions depended on a small number of globally integrated service providers. At the same time, disruptions did not only occur through technical failures. In a widely discussed case, access to email and cloud services used by a judge investigating war crimes of US allies at the International Criminal Court in The Hague was suspended by Microsoft following geopolitical pressure from the US (Lin 2025). In this widely discussed case, no infrastructure broke down. Instead, access to communication and institutional memory was withdrawn through contractual and technical means. Judicial communication, legal coordination, and the circulation of authoritative knowledge were directly affected by decisions taken outside the jurisdiction of the institution itself. This incident raises fundamental questions about where sovereignty resides when core communicative infrastructures of public authority are privately owned and globally governed.