ISTANBUL

Türkiye's cyber response team, The Computer Emergency Response Team, has requested a technical report from Google regarding the cause of the major outage that occurred on Thursday, the deputy minister of transport and infrastructure said.

"There is an outage affecting Türkiye and the European region in Google, Android, and connected services," Omer Fatih Sayan wrote on Turkish social media platform NSosyal.

He said that they are closely monitoring the process.

"These outages demonstrate how important domestic and national products and software are. For this reason, we have worked extensively to increase the domestic content rate in both the software and hardware aspects of 5G," Sayan noted.

"We will further increase our current domestic content rate of 60%," he added.

Google services were reportedly inaccessible for millions in several countries, primarily in Southeast Europe.

According to DownDetector, a surge of reports from users struggling to access Google services such as YouTube, Gmail, Chrome, Maps, Google Translate and other services started at 0700GMT.

“There was a surge in reports starting at 7.10GMT. During the outage, we received reports from Türkiye, Bulgaria, Greece, Georgia, Croatia, Serbia, Romania, North Macedonia, Armenia, Azerbaijan and 16 other countries,” wrote tracker website Outage.Report.