Users across multiple Eastern European countries reported a significant and ongoing outage affecting a suite of Google services, causing widespread disruption to both work and daily life.

#BREAKING Google services down in some countries, primarily felt across Southeastern Europe pic.twitter.com/cMYRYPHFi8

— Anadolu English (@anadoluagency) September 4, 2025

Reports began flooding into downdetector.com and social media platforms around from users in Bulgaria, Turkey, Greece and other Eastern European countries. The issues appear to be widespread and are affecting core Google products.

Google down in the Caucasus, Turkey, and the Balkans pic.twitter.com/E2SHOuKOA9

— Hov Nazaretyan (@HovhanNaz) September 4, 2025

Which Services Were Impacted?

The outage did not seem to be universal for all Google services, but the affected apps were critical to many:

• YouTube: Users experienced an inability to load videos, with many seeing error messages or an endless loading loop. Both the website and mobile app were affected.
• Google Maps: The service was failing to load map data, search for locations, or calculate routes, leaving travellers and commuters without navigation assistance.
• Google Search: In a particularly impactful failure, the core Google Search engine was returning error messages or failing to complete searches for a significant number of users.
• Gmail: Some users were reporting issues with sending and receiving emails, though this appeared to be less consistent than the other outages.
• Google Drive: Access to cloud-stored documents and files was also disrupted for many.

The common thread among error messages was a "5xx server error" – a type of error that indicates a problem on Google's end, not with the user's individual internet connection.

Alternatively, users can use other search engines such as Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, and Brave Search.

This is a developing story. We will update this article with more information as it becomes available, including an official response from Google.