Denmark ditched Microsoft? 98 of 98 towns still log in through it

Short answer: No, Denmark did not leave Microsoft. The Digitalization Ministry that promised to go Microsoft-free "during the autumn" of 2025 has quietly buried its open source pilot, and our scan on Oct 25 2026 found every one of Denmark's 98 municipal mail domains still registered in a Microsoft 365 tenant, plus all 6 regions and 33 of 34 ministries and agencies we checked.

TL;DR: In June 2025 the Danish Ministry of Digitalization said half its staff would move to Linux and LibreOffice that summer, and Copenhagen and Aarhus said they would phase Microsoft out too. Computerworld reported on Oct 20 2026 that the ministry has dropped its Collabora pilot, which had about 40 testers. We checked 139 public mail domains against Microsoft's own login service: 98 of 98 towns, covering 5.8 million residents, still sign in through Microsoft, and so does the ministry's own domain. Microsoft's quarterly revenue went from $76.4B to $90.0B over the same stretch.

Key numbers

What	Number	Source, checked Oct 25 2026
Danish municipalities whose mail domain sits in a Microsoft 365 tenant	98 of 98	Our scan (Microsoft getuserrealm + Google DNS)
Residents of those municipalities	5,799,179	Wikidata population figures
Municipal domains whose mail goes straight to Microsoft (MX)	41 of 98	Google Public DNS
Regions in a Microsoft tenant	6 of 6	Our scan
Ministries and central agencies in a Microsoft tenant	33 of 34	Our scan
Testers in the ministry's dropped Collabora pilot	about 40	Computerworld DK, Oct 20 2026
Hacker News points: exit threads vs the burial thread	1,824 vs 209	HN Algolia API
Microsoft quarterly revenue, Q2 2025 vs Q2 2026	$76.4B vs $90.0B	SEC EDGAR

The promise: Microsoft-free "during the autumn"

On June 10 2025, then Digitalization Minister Caroline Stage told Politiken her ministry would put half its staff on Linux and LibreOffice that summer, and that "if everything goes as expected, all employees will be on an open-source solution during the autumn." Heise and The Record both carried the quote.

A week earlier, Copenhagen and Aarhus, the two biggest cities, said they would phase Microsoft out over cost, near-monopoly worries and Trump-era politics. Copenhagen's audit committee chair Henrik Appel Espersen told Politiken: "if we suddenly can't send emails or communicate within our systems, we're in trouble."

The internet ate it up. Greenland threats, the ICC email cutoff, a small country telling Redmond no. It was the perfect story.

The burial: 40 testers, no announcement

On Oct 20 2026, Computerworld's Dan Jensen reported that the ministry has "in all silence" dropped the pilot. It started in summer 2025 with almost 40 employees testing Collabora, the browser version of LibreOffice, supplied by the Danish firm cBrain (Computerworld DK).

So the plan went from "the entire ministry by autumn" to roughly 40 testers to zero. No press conference for that part.

Fun detail from our scan: cBrain's own domain is registered in a Microsoft tenant and takes its mail on Google. Collabora's own company domain routes mail to Zoho. Even the alternative vendors don't eat their own cooking for email.

We checked every town. All 98 still sign in through Microsoft

Here is the test anyone can run. Microsoft publishes a login lookup (getuserrealm) that says whether an email domain belongs to a Microsoft 365 tenant. A tenant is the company account Microsoft keeps for an organization: it runs the logins, the mailboxes and Teams. We asked it about every Danish public body we could list, then pulled each domain's mail records (MX, the DNS line that says which server receives mail) from Google's public DNS.

• Municipalities: 98 of 98 mail domains sit in a Microsoft tenant. That is 98 separate tenants, every one tagged to Microsoft's EU region.
• Regions: 6 of 6, including the new Region Østdanmark domain, which already shares Region Sjælland's tenant.
• Ministries and agencies: 33 of 34. The one miss is the newest ministry, Samfundssikkerhed og Beredskab (mssb.dk). Its mail still runs through the same state mail servers as the rest.
• Copenhagen and Aarhus: kk.dk is a tenant named "Københavns Kommune". aarhus.dk is a tenant named "Aarhus kommune".

To prove the test can say no, we ran it on Schleswig-Holstein, the German state that actually moved its staff to LibreOffice and Open-Xchange. Its domain is not in any Microsoft tenant. Denmark's are.

Fair caveat: a tenant proves Microsoft runs the logins and the mail identity, not that every desk opens Word. But "we can't send emails if Washington pulls the plug" was the whole argument, and that is exactly the layer still on Microsoft.

The ministry's own domain now lives in someone else's tenant

This is the bit nobody has said out loud. digmin.dk, the ministry that ran the pilot, is registered in a Microsoft tenant branded "Uddannelses- og Forskningsministeriet", the research and education ministry. It is the same tenant as ufm.dk.

And the government's own minister list now has one person, Christina Egelund, as minister for research, education and digitalization. Our read: the pilot didn't lose a technical fight. It lost its owner in a reshuffle, and the new owner's house runs on Microsoft. Nobody has confirmed that motive, but the tenant record is public and you can check it yourself.

The state layer tells the same story. 22 of the 34 state domains route mail through Statens It, the shared government IT shop, and Statens It's own domain is a Microsoft tenant too.

Why the exits stall: everyone wanted the headline, not the migration

Back in June 2025, Danish Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson (@dhh) wrote that sovereignty means "no more Microsoft 365, no more Teams, no more Azure", and warned that "Denmark is also full of unambitious, defeatist bureaucrats who can't imagine a world without Microsoft." He also flagged the Capital Region's IT director calling the whole idea utopian the same day.

Sixteen months later, the data says DHH called it. The defeatists didn't need to win an argument. They just needed to wait.

Attention faded first. The LibreOffice article on Danish Wikipedia got 1,347 views in June 2025, the month of the announcement. By September 2026 it was 115, down 91%. On Hacker News, the six "Denmark dumps Microsoft" threads from June 2025 to February 2026 scored 1,824 points. The "silently drops" thread scored 209.

That is how lock-in works. Exits are press releases. Staying is the default setting, and defaults don't need a vote.

Follow the money: Microsoft never felt it

Microsoft booked $76.4B of revenue in the quarter Denmark announced its exit (April to June 2025). A year later, the same quarter came in at $90.0B, up 17.7% (SEC EDGAR).

Who wins: Microsoft, which keeps 98 municipal tenants and the state layer without cutting a price. The local mail filter vendors win too. 57 towns send mail somewhere else first, mostly Danish or European filters (Centera alone handles 31). That looks sovereign in DNS and still hands the mailbox to a Microsoft tenant.

Who loses: taxpayers, if the savings were real. And the one number we have says they were.

The one exit that worked saved 72%

Aarhus's head of digital services in the culture and citizens department, Bo Fristed, said a German provider had already replaced Microsoft there, cutting that department's yearly cost from 800,000 kroner to 225,000 kroner (Ritzau / The Local). He also admitted most staff saw it as a downgrade.

That is the real trade, and it is a market trade: pay 72% less, retrain people, accept some friction. Governments keep choosing the press release instead. Lowkey the most expensive option on the table.

Our bet: when we rerun this scan on Oct 25 2027, Denmark is still 98 of 98. The first town to drop off will be one that writes a budget line for retraining, not one that gives an interview.

What this means for you

Check your own kill switch the way we checked Denmark's. Two lookups, two minutes:

curl "https://login.microsoftonline.com/getuserrealm.srf?login=you@yourdomain.com&json=1"
curl "https://dns.google/resolve?name=yourdomain.com&type=MX"

If the first says "Managed" or "Federated", Microsoft runs your logins. If the MX ends in outlook.com or google.com, one US vendor holds your inbox. That is fine if you chose it. It is a problem if you think you didn't. We ran the same kind of scan across Europe's top sites in Musk showed Europe the kill switch, and the pattern holds: the exit is in the speeches, not the DNS. More in News, AI industry and our open source hub.

If you want someone to read your live stack the way an attacker or a vendor would, our $49 Launch Check finds exposed keys, open tables and missing headers, worst first, with the exact fix in 48 hours. If a problem we checked turns up later, we keep fixing it at no extra cost.

Not financial advice: the Microsoft revenue figures are context, not a call on the stock.

All 139 rows (tenant, tenant name, region, MX, SPF and verification records for every domain) are in the free download below.

Sources

• Computerworld DK (Dan Jensen), Digitaliseringsministeriet har i al stilhed droppet stort anlagt forsøg med open source-alternativ til Microsoft, Oct 20 2026
• Heise (Martin Holland), Danish ministry says goodbye to Microsoft, Jun 10 2025
• The Record (Daryna Antoniuk), Danish government agency to ditch Microsoft software, Jun 2025, checked Oct 25 2026
• The Register (Liam Proven), Danish department determined to dump Microsoft, Jun 13 2025
• Ritzau / The Local, Danish cities drop Microsoft over Trump policies and financial concerns, Jun 3 2025
• David Heinemeier Hansson, Denmark gets more serious about digital sovereignty, Jun 3 2025
• Regeringen.dk, Ministrene, checked Oct 25 2026
• Microsoft getuserrealm and OpenID configuration endpoints, queried Oct 25 2026
• Google Public DNS (MX, TXT, CNAME), queried Oct 25 2026
• Wikidata, Danish municipalities, websites and populations, Oct 25 2026
• SEC EDGAR, Microsoft companyfacts, Oct 25 2026
• Wikimedia Pageviews API, LibreOffice (da and en), Oct 25 2026
• Hacker News threads 44255352, 47149701 and others in hn_threads.csv, Oct 25 2026