An outage may have affected millions of Google users who rely on the search engine for the latest news.
Down Detector noted a spike in user complaints starting at around 7:59 a.m. ET on Friday related to the Google News feed, which links to the latest stories from publications around the world.
Entrepreneur also viewed Google News as down.
The unexplained outage seems to have been global, with reports flooding in from the U.S., the U.K., Canada, and continental Europe.
Is Google news search broken or not working for anyone else? Every search yields no results. pic.twitter.com/WEiHvFeaJ2
— Protopop Games (@protopop) May 31, 2024
Google Discover, a personal feed available on smartphones that shows news stories, also appears to have been affected by the outage.
Some users said Google News was back up about two hours after the outage was first reported but that Discover was still not working.
News across Google and News apps, desktop is back for me. Discover still not working. pic.twitter.com/tNU3eBz5Es
— Gagan Ghotra (@gaganghotra_) May 31, 2024
As of February, Google News had about 280 million worldwide. Google estimated in a 2022 blog post that users click from Google News and Google Search results to news sites more than 24 billion times per month.
Entrepreneur reached out to Google asking if Google detected the outage, the possible reasons for it, and when it will be resolved. Google did not immediately respond.
Google News was back up and running as of press time.
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