Google News DOWN: Unexplained outage leaves users across US and UK cut off from latest headlines
Searches within the 'News' tab in the UK and United States of America currently returns 0 results
GBN
Update — Friday May 31, 15.44 BST
Google News and Google Discover functionality appears to have been restored across the UK and United States, with reports on Down Detector dropping back within a normal range. Anecdotal posts on social media suggest the fifth biggest news website on the planet is working as expected for most people. However, there are still a handful of complaints about the Google Discover feed not working.
Google has not commented on the outage or revealed the reason behind the downtime.
Our original coverage of the Google News outage follows below, although be aware that some facts might be outdated...
A glitch with Google has left users unable to access the latest headlines under its "News" tab. The outage, which started soon after 3pm BST, impacts the standalone Google News service as well as all searches under the "News" tab on the Google website. The collapse of the dedicated news service appears to have impacted users across the UK and United States — potentially leaving millions without access.
The Californian company has not commented on the outage.
When you search on the Google website, the US technology giant offers a number of different tabs to filter the results, including Images, News, Video, Shopping, and more. At the time of writing, trying to narrow down search results to recent news stories using the "News" tab on the Google website returns 0 results.
Searches within the 'News' tab in the UK and United States of America returns 0 results due to the error in Google's code
GBN
Users are warned that the words in their search "did not match any news results". We were able to replicate this issue when searching for GB News — a term that would typically show thousands of results. Google also offers some suggestions for users to improve the likeliness of returning more results in future, adding:
Suggestions:
- Make sure that all words are spelled correctly.
- Try different keywords.
- Try more general keywords.
- Try fewer keywords.
The outage doesn't just impact those looking to narrow down search results using the "News" tab on the main Google website, it has also taken down the standalone Google News service, which aggregates sources from across the internet around news topics
GBN
Google's news aggregator tool — available to all users at news.google.com — is also down across the UK and United States. By default, this dedicated news tool offers a number of different categories to bring together news stories and videos from thousands of sources across the web, including World, Local, Technology, Sports, Entertainment, and Science, to name just a few.
Selecting any of these topics returns the warning: "There are no items to show."
Google News is one of the most popular news websites on the planet, with an estimated 375.6 million visits to the website every month. That makes it the fifth most-visited news website worldwide.
Over 1,100 complaints have been tracked in the United States by independent service Down Detector, with hundreds also recorded in the UK
DOWN DETECTOR | GBN
Enraged users who rely on Google to find the latest headlines have taken to social media to complain about the downtime. According to independent website DownDetector, which monitors complaints across social media and forums to determine when an application or online service is experiencing issues, has recorded hundreds of complaints from disgruntled Google News users in the UK.
In the United States, complaints about Google News being down have now topped 1,000 every minute. That shows the immense scale of the problem for Google.
"Is, uh, google news busted?" one person posted on X, formerly known as Twitter.
Another was similarly confused about searches failing to show any results, sharing a screenshot of a search for "weather" with 0 results and the caption: "Is Google news search broken or not working for anyone else? Every search yields no results."
"well... the google news tab is officially just completely broken. cool cool cool." one X user posted.
According to search expert Barry Schwartz, who runs the blog Search Engine Roundtable, the unknown error that's causing issues for the dedicated Google News website and "News" tab in Google search is also responsible for problems with the Google Discover feed for millions of Android users.
This is accessed by swiping from left to right on the homescreen of your Android phone.
What's happening with the Google news section shows no results what's abt yours ??
— Dilip Dwivedi (@me_dilipdwivedi) May 31, 2024
What's happening with the Google news section shows no results what's abt yours ??
— Dilip Dwivedi (@me_dilipdwivedi) May 31, 2024
Either google news is down, or defence cuts really are a thing. pic.twitter.com/Pe91Tg0afm
— Dr Iain Overton (@iainoverton) May 31, 2024
Discover usually loads a series of news articles, YouTube videos, and other content from across the internet that its algorithm believes will align with your tastes. Previous Google searches and YouTube viewing history are used to tailor the recommendations.
However, the latest Google News outage seems to be preventing new content loading into the Discover feed. iPhone and iPad owners can also access the Google Discover feed, but they'll need to download the dedicated Google app, since it's not baked into the operating system like it is on Android.
Google Discover is a feed of curated news stories, YouTube videos, and other content from across the web tailored to your tastes — it seems to have also been impacted by the latest Google outage
GOOGLE PRESS OFFICE
The widespread issues with Google News arrive a fortnight after Google confirmed sweeping changes would be coming to its search engine, powered by its latest Artificial Intelligence (AI) model.
In a dramatic reworking of the tool that kickstarted the $2.1 trillion technology company, Google will no longer prioritise a static list of blue links to websites that match your query, instead using AI to attempt to present a fully-formed answer to your query — pulling from resources across the internet to do so.
For example, if you search "how to clean a fabric sofa," you'll be presented with a block of text with a number of different tips — with Google Gemini presenting links to the webpages with the original suggestions at the bottom of the new panel, which the US company refers to as an AI Overview.
If you continue to scroll down the page, you'll find Google Shopping results, the People Also Ask... prompts, and only then, the list of blue links that have characterised Google search since its launch back in September 1998.
Users have the chance to tweak just how much information is shown in the AI Overview, toggling between a dense text-heavy response with plenty of detail, or something snappier for those short on time.