Ursula von der Leyen

During a 40C heatwave the European Commission's Brussels HQ cut air conditioning on floors 1 to 7 while upper floors stayed cool. The thread surfaced the timeline from an EU-politics journalist: the shutdown rolled floor by floor from 4pm Friday, hit the whole building by day's end, and worked fine by Monday.

The mundane cause: ACs sized for 30C can't cope at 40C, so cutting the lower half buys performance up top. The awkward detail, from a separate outlet: the failure spared floors above level 8, where von der Leyen and the commissioners sit.

W Social bills itself as Europe's sovereign alternative to X. In June 2026 the European Commission, the ECB, Ursula von der Leyen and Christine Lagarde migrated their accounts to it from Bluesky.

Elena Rossini's post notes the platform is a for-profit Swedish LLC that quietly deleted its GitHub repo, going closed-source, while an open non-profit network on the same protocol, Eurosky, drew no press and no politicians. The thread's verdict: the same private-platform mistake all over again.