Google services have been disabled in Eastern Europe, with the Balkans and the Black Sea region being the most affected.

On Thursday morning, users in Eastern Europe experienced a major outage of Google services, particularly in the Balkan Peninsula countries, Turkey, and Georgia. The incident began around 08:10 GMT.

Google services have stopped working in a significant part of Eastern Europe, primarily affecting the Balkan region, as well as some areas of Turkey and Georgia. Users are reporting the unavailability of the Google search engine, cloud document services, email, as well as the platforms YouTube and Spotify.

Disruptions to digital platforms have affected the Balkan and Black Sea regions, and partially impacted the Netherlands and the USA. The first reports of problems began to arrive at 08:10 GMT.

The highest number of requests was recorded from the countries of the Balkan and Black Sea regions. The list of the most affected countries includes Turkey, Bulgaria, Greece, Georgia, Croatia, Serbia, Romania, North Macedonia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and 16 other countries where problems were observed partially. Most of the requests came from Turkey and Bulgaria. Later, reports of failures began to come from Western Europe, indicating a possible expansion of the area of technical issues.

During the first hour after the failure, the cause of the incident remained unknown. In Bulgaria, most regional mobile network operators also reported issues with some of their services. The failure disrupted the functioning of many digital platforms, including Spotify, Claude, and even Starlink. The most serious consequences were experienced by mobile operators in Bulgaria, as all of them used Google cloud services, which clearly demonstrates the risks of centralizing digital infrastructure.

Additional messages indicate issues with the operation of browsers and Discord servers, which has led to disruptions in communications and the availability of work tools in the affected regions.

Possible geopolitical dimension of the failure

The concentration of Google service outages in the Black Sea region immediately sparked speculation about a possible targeted attack on internet infrastructure.

The geography of the outage coincides with the entry points of several major underwater cables in the Black Sea, connecting Bulgaria, Turkey, and Georgia. So far, there have been no confirmed reports of physical infrastructure damage, and the affected countries are utilizing other social platforms for communication.

Google has not yet released an official statement regarding the reasons for the outage. During previous similar incidents, the primary cause was issues with the company's data centers and their power sources. One potential attack vector could be targeted actions by hackers on the energy systems of Google's data centers, leading to their shutdown. In the past, such outages mainly affected the USA, and a significant difference in the current situation is the concentration of problems in the Black Sea region, including countries that Russia has declared unfriendly.

It is noteworthy that the failure occurred almost a year after Russia was disconnected from all Google services as a result of the sanctions imposed on September 12, 2024.