An outage affected millions of Google users on Friday, the company confirmed The entrepreneur.
“There was an issue that briefly affected some results in Google News, Discover and other products,” a spokesperson said in an emailed statement. “We've fixed the problem and things should be working normally now.”
Detector down pointed out a spike in user complaints starting around 7:59 a.m. Friday about the Google News feed, which links to the latest stories from publications around the world.
The entrepreneur also saw Google News as below.
The outage appears to have been global, with reports pouring in from the US, UK, Canada and continental Europe.
Is Google News Search broken or not working for anyone else? Every search returns no result. 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 down.
News in the Google and News desktop apps is back for me. Discover still not working. pic.twitter.com/tNU3eBz5Es
— Gagan Ghotra (@gaganghotra_) May 31, 2024
Regarding February, Google News had about 280 million users worldwide. Google evaluated in a 2022 blog post that users click from Google News and Google Search results to news sites more than 24 billion times a month.
Google News was back up and running at press time.
Connected: Site traffic down? Here are the big AI changes Google made to its search engine