Europe's GDPR cops dished out €1.2B in fines last year as data breaches piled up

DLA Piper’s 2025 GDPR Fines and Data Breach Survey reports that EU regulators issued roughly £1B (€1.2B) in fines in 2025 and are receiving an average of 443 personal data breach notifications per day—up 22% year over year—signaling intensified post-plateau enforcement; the study cites converging drivers (geopolitics, repeated cyber incidents, commoditized attack tooling, and overlapping regimes such as NIS2 and DORA) and highlights Ireland’s dominant role in enforcement (total €4.04B since 2018), a €530M fine against TikTok, and big tech’s outsized share of top penalties, underscoring the need to strengthen cyber defenses and operational resilience.