Every e-government development has its supporting factors and various limitations that hinder the implementation of e-government initiatives and further improvement of e-services. This paper examines and evaluates the specific challenges, trends and the progress of e-government between the years 2008 and 2014 in the European Union Member States based on the global e-government development indices. It is focused on the effects and consequences of the European recession, which started as the global financial crisis in 2007 and was followed by the European debt crisis since the end of 2009. The purpose of this research study is to understand the influence of selected indicators on the e-government development in order to uncover similarities and identify areas that were affected by the crisis a need further improvement. The results of this work may be used to introduce more efficient measurements and benchmarking frameworks of the e-government development. The main methods used are descriptive, correlation and cluster analysis.