Microsoft is finding itself in an increasingly precarious situation in the European Union (EU), where a working group of German data protection regulators has come to the conclusion that the American company has not been able to resolve any of the compliance issues it raised relating to the cloud-based Microsoft 365 productivity suite.

In September, the local Data Protection Authority (DPA) for the Hesse state in central Germany banned the use of Microsoft 365 in its schools due to worries about privacy infringement. The DPA said it collects data from users’ software, in a clear violation of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) rules.