Google services go dark in Eastern Europe, with Balkans and Black Sea hit hardest

Google services were affected in Eastern Europe, with the outage starting at 08:10 GMT. The Balkans, Turkey, and Georgia had the most widespread outages. 

Google services went down in parts of Europe, mostly affecting the Balkans, as well as parts of Turkey and Georgia. The outage started as of 08:10 GMT, affecting Google Search, docs, mail, as well as YouTube and Spotify. 

Google services went out in the Balkan and Black Sea regions, as well as in parts of Holland and the USA. User reports started as of 08:10 GMT. | Source: Google outage map.

The surge of reports came from the Balkan and Black Sea regions, with the list of most affected countries including Turkey, Bulgaria, Greece, Georgia, Croatia, Serbia, Romania, North Macedonia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and 16 other countries partially affected. The most common reports originated from Turkey and Bulgaria. Later, more reports were posted from Western Europe, showing a larger region may be affected.

Within the first hour of the attack, there was no clarity as to the cause of the outage. In Bulgaria, most regional GSM operators also reported outages for some of their services. The outage has disrupted multiple services, including Spotify, Claude, and even Starlink. Mobile operators in Bulgaria were affected the most, as they all used Google’s cloud services, showcasing the risks of centralization.

Additional reports include browser problems and Discord server outages, cutting communications and general working tools in the affected regions.

Can the Google outage be a geopolitical event?

The concentration of Google service outages in the Black Sea region immediately recalled the potential for a deliberate attack against internet infrastructure.

The EU has set out plans for new underwater cables, to bypass dependence on Russia for the regional infrastructure. | Source: FT.

The outage tracks the entry points of some of the major Black Sea underwater cables, connecting Bulgaria, Turkey, and Georgia. So far, no reports have been confirmed on damaged physical infrastructure, and the countries are using other social media to communicate.

Google did not yet issue a statement on the reason for the outage. During past outages, the main reason was a problem with Google’s data centers and their power sources. One of the potential vectors of attack is hackers targeting Google services power sources, disabling data centers. Previously, the outages mostly affected the USA, with the big difference being the targeting of the Black Sea region, including countries which Russia has pronounced as hostile to its interests.

The outage happened almost a year after Russia was sanctioned by being removed from all Google services, as of September 12, 2024.

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