Operating safe and reliable power system is imperative for the unobstructed supply of consumers. A large interconnected system can be severely destabilized due to failures of interconnector lines and large generating units. Although work has been done in this field of power system component reliability, most of the literature focuses on North American generating units. Therefore, identifying the failure behavior of critical European assets can be invaluable for modeling and research purposes. In this work, we analyze outages of generation and transmission system assets, obtained from the ENTSO-E transparency platform. We utilize statistical analyses and advanced clustering methods to examine the failure behavior and identify influencing factors. Our results show that the reliability of generating units is primarily impacted by the technology type and the size of the generator. Nuclear units have the lowest forced outage factor of 1.2%, while the highest forced outage factor is observed in fossil units, with 3.4%. This is likely due to the high level of scrutiny that is present in nuclear safety, as nuclear units have the highest planned outage factor of 18.9%. Regarding transmission system assets, we find that AC interconnectors are remarkably more reliable than DC interconnectors. The most reliable assets appear to be transformer units, closely followed by internal transmission lines. The forced outage factor of transformers is 0.036%, an order of magnitude lower than the factor for AC interconnectors, which is 0.11%. Additionally, we identify the Sweden-Germany interconnection as the most frequently disrupted interconnection in the European system, experiencing up to 26 planned disruptions per year. The results obtained from this work can provide key insights for the operation of the European transmission system, helping system operators and researchers identify vulnerabilities.