Massive Google Outage Hit 47 Countries, Including Bulgaria – Services Slowly Restored
Source: Novinite.com (Sofia News Agency)
A large-scale technical failure disrupted Google’s services on Thursday, affecting users in 47 countries, including Bulgaria. Among them were nearly all Balkan states, as well as Germany, France, the United Kingdom, and others. Data from the monitoring platforms “Outage.Report” and Downdetector, published while the problem was still ongoing, confirmed the global scope of the disruption.
Novinite was one of the first Bulgarian media to report the disruption
The outage, which lasted close to two hours, cut access to some of the most widely used products of the company Alphabet. Users reported difficulties with the Google search engine, Gmail, YouTube, Google Drive, and other key applications. In Bulgaria, services were restored around 13:18 local time. While search, email, and video streaming were accessible again, technical difficulties with Google Maps persisted, BTA reported.
At its peak, reports of service interruptions poured into monitoring platforms such as Downdetector.com and Outage.Report, which track the availability of major online services. After systems began recovering, the number of complaints dropped significantly. According to NetBlocks, quoted by DPA, the incident was unrelated to government-level internet restrictions or filtering. The problems first appeared around 10:10 a.m. Bulgarian time, when attempts to perform a Google search produced browser notifications that the request could not be completed.
The disruption had a particularly heavy impact in Southeast Europe, with Bulgaria, Romania, Greece, Turkey, Croatia, Serbia, Georgia, and Armenia among the worst hit. Countries such as Poland, the Netherlands, Germany, and France also faced major service interruptions. International monitoring tools registered more than 30 affected countries in total.
The reasons for the collapse have not yet been officially clarified. Speaking on NOVA News, cybersecurity expert Lyubomir Tulev outlined several possible explanations. The first is a hacker attack, but he noted that large-scale groups usually take responsibility quickly, which has not happened in this case, making this version less likely. Another possibility is a technical or hardware malfunction within Google’s infrastructure, such as failures in data centers or breakdowns of critical components.
Tulev also pointed to potential errors in DNS (Domain Name System) configurations. Incorrect changes in these settings, which direct internet traffic, have previously caused major disruptions, including the massive Facebook crash two years ago. Another theory involves issues with the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) – a system that routes internet traffic globally. The expert recalled the Facebook incident in 2021, when precisely such a failure left billions of users offline for hours.
Additionally, problems in so-called backbone servers, the high-level infrastructure responsible for distributing network traffic worldwide, cannot be ruled out. Tulev emphasized that without an official explanation from Google, these remain only hypotheses.
For now, users are regaining access to most services, but the company has yet to issue a formal statement clarifying the exact cause of the disruption.
The original article: belongs to Novinite.com (Sofia News Agency) .
