Google News went down worldwide: What happened and what to do
Around 8:00 am EST on May 31, Google News experienced an outage affecting millions of users. The outage impacted the iOS and Android Google News apps, the Google News webpage, the "News" tab on Google Search, and Google Discover. The issue was resolved for most users around 10:45 am EST.
Users arriving at the Google News webpage or mobile apps were met with the error message: "Uh-oh, something went wrong. Please try again." Google Discover and the "News" tab on Google Search experienced issues loading and refreshing, which may have been connected to the Google News outage.
People all over the world reported seeing these errors, which we confirmed on our end. While Google has not released a statement on the outage yet, we monitored the situation as it unfolded. Here's a look at what happened and what you can do if you are still experiencing issues with Google News, Search, or Discover.
What caused the Google News outage?
Google has not announced what exactly caused the Google News outage today. However, it did update the official Google Search Status Dashboard at 8:29 am PDT/11:29 am EST to mark today's issues as fully resolved.
Since Google News is an aggregator site, it's possible the error had something to do with the service's ability to pull in news pieces from other websites. However, we won't know the exact cause unless Google reveals it. As of noon on May 31, no announcement has been made.
What to do if Google News is still down for you
As of noon on May 31, the Google News outage has officially been marked "resolved" by Google. However, there are a few things you can try if you are still experiencing issues. The main errors you may notice are Google News feeds failing to load and Google Discover feeds either failing to load or loading only a few, non-personalized results.
If you are using the Google News or Chrome mobile apps, start by completely closing out of the app. You may need to force quit to get it to close entirely. Restart the app and try loading your News or Discover feeds again. On the Chrome mobile app, you may need to refresh new tabs a couple of times before your personalized Discover feed comes up.
Likewise, on the browser version of Google News, start by refreshing the page and if that does not bring up your usual news feed, close out of your browser entirely and start a new session.
On May 31, around 8:00 am EST, users across the globe began reporting an outage on the news aggregator Google News. According to DownDetector, 70% of users are reporting issues with the Google News website itself while 28% report issues with search.
We can verify both features are experiencing errors right now. The Google News landing page is currently failing to load and attempts to search for news topics and articles end in the error message: "There are no items to show."
Users' curated news feeds aren't the only feature that's offline. Every category on Google News is currently reporting "There are no items to show."
The issue appears to be impacting users across the US, Canada, the UK, India, and more.
Around 9:45 am EST, Google News came back online for users in North America and Europe. The web version of Google News is now successfully loading news feeds again and search functionality is back online.
There has still been no announcement from Google about the outage, but its team does seem to be addressing the issue. The outage lasted about 2 hours in most areas.
The app versions of Google News are also back online now. We can confirm it is back up on our end, as well. All of the news feed tabs in the app are working as usual and the search feature is back online. However, there is still no word from Google about what caused the outage.
According to Google's official Search Status Dashboard, issues with certain features in Google Search are still ongoing, including the "News" tab on Google and Google Discover. The News tab on the web version of Google Search appears to be back online on our end, but Discover is still offline.
Users impacted by the ongoing outage may notice that the usual feed of Google Discover news featured on new tab pages in Chrome is failing to load or showing fewer results than usual. Discover may also initially fail to load, but it loads successfully after refreshing the page.
After testing the issue on our end, it looks like personalized Google Discover results are not loading, even when the Discover feed appears successfully. Reloading is not currently refreshing the Discover feed, either.
The "Following" tab in Google Discover is experiencing issues loading. The main "News Headlines" feed is loading, but appears to feature just a few news articles which don't refresh. When tabbing over to the "Following" feed, curated news is not loading.
Users may see the message: "To follow a query, go to google.com, search the topic you are interested in, and tap Follow."
The main "Discover" tab is back up and running, but the "Following" tab may still be failing to load for some users. The main Google Discover feed is now loading personalized results again on our end and loading the usual feed of dozens of news articles, rather than just a few. Refreshing new tabs is also refreshing the Discover feed again as usual.
