Google Services Go Dark Across Eastern Europe—Balkans and Black Sea Regions Hit Hardest
Google's digital infrastructure just went offline across Eastern Europe—and the Balkans and Black Sea regions are feeling the deepest impact.
Mass Disruption Hits Critical Services
Search, Maps, Gmail, and cloud services dropped without warning. Businesses froze, communications stalled, and daily digital routines shattered. No official explanation yet—just radio silence from Mountain View.
Tech Giants Show Their Fragility
When a single company controls so much of the web’s backbone, outages aren’t hiccups—they’re systemic failures. Reminder: centralization always has a single point of failure. Meanwhile, crypto networks hum along, unstoppable and decentralized—no CEO to blame, no headquarters to protest.
Finance’s Ironic Reliance on Big Tech
Traditional finance loves to mock crypto volatility—until their beloved Google Sheets and analytics platforms vanish mid-trade. Guess spreadsheets aren’t so reliable when the cloud goes dark. Maybe time to short legacy tech and long blockchain resilience.
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 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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