On Thursday morning, millions of users across Eastern Europe found themselves cut off from essential Google services - the search engine, Gmail, Google Maps, YouTube, Google Drive, and virtual communication platforms. The outage also affected the ability to log into various websites via Google accounts, creating serious disruptions for private users, businesses, and government institutions alike. Novinite was the first Bulgarian media to report the disruption.
On Nova TV, cybersecurity expert Lyubomir Tulev noted the severity of the impact: "Many people couldn't even use ChatGPT because they log in with a Google account. For some, this was an inconvenience, but for others it meant real losses." In Turkey, where the government relies heavily on Google Workspace for administration, "the state machine was literally blocked for an hour and a half."
A Regional Pattern Emerges
The Google outage wasn't global but strategically concentrated around the Black Sea region. Among the countries reporting the highest number of complaints were Bulgaria, Turkey, Greece, Georgia, Croatia, Serbia, Romania, North Macedonia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. The affected services included search engines, maps, office software, emails, YouTube, Spotify, and communication platforms like Discord.
Perhaps most significantly, the affected region includes countries that Moscow officially defines as "unfriendly" due to their strong support for Ukraine with weapons and other aid. This geographical targeting raises uncomfortable questions about whether the outage was coincidental or represented a new form of hybrid warfare.
In Bulgaria, mobile operators also reported service disruptions, likely due to their dependence on Google's cloud infrastructure. The pattern of affected countries has raised uncomfortable questions about whether this was merely a technical failure or something more sinister.
The concentration of outages around the Black Sea has triggered suspicions of a deliberate attack by Russia on the internet infrastructure. Significantly, the affected areas align with routes of major submarine cables connecting Bulgaria, Turkey, and Georgia - critical digital highways that have become increasingly vulnerable to sabotage.
Suspicious Sabotage Incidents
This latest outage occurs against a backdrop of escalating Russian attacks on critical undersea infrastructure. The timeline is telling:
The European Union has already announced plans to build new undersea cables to reduce dependence on Russia. However, existing connections have increasingly become subjects of suspicious damage. Bulgaria and Romania are part of a project for an undersea energy corridor to the Caucasus, stretching over 1,100 kilometers. While designed to transport green energy, this corridor represents critical infrastructure that could easily become a target.
Missing Explanation
What makes this incident particularly concerning is Google's continued silence. The company has not provided an official explanation for the outage, which cybersecurity experts find unusual. "If it was a software problem or an incorrect update, they would have admitted it by now," Tulev observed. "They are probably checking the possibility of a physical problem with the infrastructure."
Assumptions have emerged in cyber forums that the outage relates to a broken transmission cable between Bulgaria and Romania. As Tulev commented, "If this is proven, we are talking about a deliberate act. Such routes are not vulnerable like cables 'on the ground' - they are laid deep and are difficult to damage by accident."
Tulev ruled out a traditional hacker attack: "If there had been hacking, the groups would have immediately boasted about it." However, the expert noted that there's no evidence of information leakage or security breach - "the problem is related to the accessibility of services, not to information theft."
The incident has highlighted the vulnerability of national communications infrastructure. Turkey's cybersecurity agency has requested a technical report from Google and emphasized the importance of digital sovereignty. In Bulgaria, while mobile operators managed to continue working with backup channels, the outage exposed significant risks to national communications.
No, It Wasn't Russia
The incident serves as a stark reminder of how dependent modern societies have become on digital infrastructure - but not necessarily how vulnerable that infrastructure is to foreign sabotage. The rapid restoration of services within hours, the lack of data breaches, and the absence of any broader coordinated attack suggest this was a technical failure that exposed infrastructure dependencies rather than a deliberate assault.
The initial speculation about Russian involvement, while reflecting legitimate concerns about hybrid warfare, appears to have been driven more by the geopolitical climate than by concrete evidence. The pattern of recent authentic cable attacks created a framework where any significant technical disruption in the region would inevitably be viewed through a security lens.
Without an official explanation from Google, early theories naturally gravitated toward the most dramatic possibilities. The question "Did Russia do it?" captured headlines and reflected genuine concerns about infrastructure security. However, the available evidence, including the lack of hacker group claims, the absence of data breaches, the purely technical nature of the service restoration, and expert analysis pointing to hardware or human error, suggests a far more mundane reality.
For Bulgaria and its neighbors, the real lesson isn't about Russian cyber warfare, but about digital resilience and infrastructure redundancy. The outage revealed how dependent the region has become on single points of failure in the digital ecosystem. While the specter of sabotage will continue to loom over any major infrastructure disruption, this particular incident appears to be a case where geopolitical anxiety temporarily overshadowed technical reality.