An outage affected millions of Google users on Friday, the company confirmed to Entrepreneur.
“There was an issue that was briefly affecting some results on Google News, Discover, and other products,” a spokesperson said in an emailed statement. “We’ve fixed the issue and things should be working normally now.”
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 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
Some users said Google News was back up about two hours after the outage was first reported but Google Discover, a personal feed available on smartphones that shows news stories, 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 users 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.
Google News was back up and running as of press time.
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