Google Services Crash: Gmail, YouTube, Maps Reportedly Experience Major Outages Across Eastern Europe, US Cities

Alphabet Inc. GOOGL GOOG experienced widespread service disruptions on Thursday morning, affecting core platforms including Gmail, YouTube and Google Maps across Eastern Europe and major U.S. cities including New York and Chicago, according to DownDetector tracking data.

Service Impact Scale Raises Investor Concerns

Reports began flooding social media platforms around 10 a.m. local time (3 a.m. ET) from users in Bulgaria, Turkey, and Greece. The disruptions primarily showed “5xx server errors,” indicating server-side infrastructure problems rather than user connectivity issues, according to Bulgaria’s Novinite newspaper.

"Multiple Google services experienced network connectivity issues in various European and Asian regions. We are investigating this further. Please refer to our status dashboard for more detail,” Google Cloud spokespersons said in an emailed statement to Benzinga.

Critical Services Experiencing Disruptions

YouTube faced the most severe impact, with users unable to load videos across both web and mobile platforms. Google Maps failed to provide navigation data, while Google Search returned error messages for significant user segments. Gmail and Google Drive also reported intermittent access issues, according to the report.

Market Context Amid Legal Pressures

The service disruption comes one day after Alphabet faced a $425 million privacy class action verdict in San Francisco federal court.

The timing adds pressure following Tuesday’s antitrust ruling, though U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta rejected Department of Justice proposals to force divestiture of Chrome or Android systems.

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