Google News goes down for millions around the world in mysterious outage – latest updates

Updated 9:56 a.m. ET: Google News is back online but Google Discover still seems to be down for many.

Google News is currently experiencing an unexplained outage that has knocked the service offline for millions of users around the world.

As reported by DownDetector (and consistent with 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. Although some users claim that search is also affected, I have not been able to reproduce this myself.

Reports began emerging at 7:59 a.m. ET / 12:59 p.m. BST today, May 31, that the site was experiencing issues and Google has yet to make an official announcement about the cause of the problem.

Users across the US, such as in Ohio and Florida, are reporting issues, as are Tom’s Guide team members across the UK, from London (where I’m based) to Manchester, also concerned. Other regions like India, Canada and continental Europe are also reporting problems.

It appears that Google Discover is also suffering and is simply resurfacing older cached content. We don’t know when this issue will be resolved, but given the reach of Google’s News service, this outage will likely affect literally millions of people right now.

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

It hasn’t been a good week for Google. A few days ago, it emerged that more than 2,500 pages of API documentation had been posted online, revealing secrets about how Google’s search algorithm works. The company’s head of research, Liz Reid, also admitted in a blog post that Google’s new AI Overview feature resulted in some pretty questionable answers to user questions that then went viral on social media .

“We hold ourselves to high standards, as do our users, which is why we expect and appreciate 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.

This story develops…

Learn more about Tom’s Guide