Update 04:39 am ET: Both Google News and Google Discover appear to be back to fully functional status now.
The company provided Tom's Guide with the following statement: “There was an issue that was briefly affecting some results on Google News, Discover and other products. We’ve fixed the issue and things should be working normally now.”
Original story: Google News is currently experiencing an unexplained outage that's knocked the service offline for millions of users worldwide.
As reported by DownDetector (and matched with Tom's Guide's own experience) the news aggregator is currently experiencing an outage on its desktop page as well as its iOS and Android apps. Whilst some users are claiming that Search is also affected, I haven't been able to replicate that myself.
Reports started to emerge at 7.59am ET / 12.59pm BST today, May 31, of the site suffering problems and Google has yet to make any official announcement on the cause of the issue.
Users across the United States — from the likes of Ohio and Florida — are reporting problems as are Tom's Guide team members across the U.K. from London (where I'm based) to Manchester also affected. Other regions like India, Canada and continental Europe are also reporting issues.
It appears that Google Discover is also suffering and is simply resurfacing cached older content. We've got no word on when this issue will be resolved, however given the reach of Google's News service, this outage is likely to be affecting literally millions of people right now.
Of course, plenty of people are taking to X to double-check that the service really is down, with a few jokes thrown in for good measure.
Google News being broken feels extremely ominous.May 31, 2024
Either google news is down, or defence cuts really are a thing. pic.twitter.com/Pe91Tg0afmMay 31, 2024
Google News is BREAKING 🔥 pic.twitter.com/AmmIFmtFhtMay 31, 2024
This hasn't been a good week for Google. A few days ago it came to light that over 2,500 pages of API documentation had been posted online exposing secrets about how Google's Search algorithm operates. The company’s head of search, Liz Reid, also admitted in a blog post that Google's new AI Overview feature surfaced some pretty questionable answers to user questions that subsequently went viral on social media.
"We hold ourselves to a high standard, as do our users, so we expect and appreciate the feedback, and take it seriously," she wrote.
Tom's Guide has contacted Google for a comment on the current Google News outage and we'll update this article if/when we receive a response.
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