Google News stops working for millions around the world due to mysterious outage

Updated at 10:34 a.m. ET: It appears that both Google News and Google Discover are back in full operation mode now.

Google News is currently experiencing an unexplained outage, causing the service to stop working for millions of users around the world.

like Reported by DownDetector (And identical to 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. While some users claim that search has also been affected, I haven’t been able to replicate that myself.

Reports started emerging at 7.59am ET / 12.59pm GMT today, May 31, that the site was experiencing issues and Google has yet to make any official announcement about the cause of the issue.

Users across the US – from the likes of Ohio and Florida – have reported issues, and members of the Tom’s Guide team across the UK from London (where I live) to Manchester have also been affected. Other regions such as India, Canada, and continental Europe have also reported issues.

Google News is, at the time of writing, offline for millions of users around the world (Image credit: Future)

Google Discover also seems to suffer and is simply resurfacing old cached content. We don’t have any information on when this issue will be resolved, but given the reach of Google News, this outage will likely affect millions of people right now.

Of course, many people turn to X to double-check that the service is actually down, with a few jokes thrown in for good measure.

Google News crashing seems very ominous.May 31, 2024

Either Google News is broken, or defensive cuts are a real thing. pic.twitter.com/Pe91Tg0afmMay 31, 2024

Breaking Google news 🔥 pic.twitter.com/AmmIFmtFhtMay 31, 2024

This has not been a good week for Google. A few days ago, it emerged that more than 2,500 pages of API documentation had been published online revealing secrets about how Google’s search algorithm works. The company’s head of research, Liz Read, also admitted in a filing Blog post Google’s new AI Overview feature revealed some very questionable answers to user questions that later spread on social media.

“We hold ourselves to high standards, as do our users, so we expect and value feedback, and take it seriously,” she wrote.

Tom’s Guide has contacted Google for comment on the current Google News outage and we will update this article if/when we receive a response.