What happened to Google News?

Isn’t it just typical that as one of the biggest, most newsworthy events in American history is happening, Google News should experience an outage?

Google News was down

For thousands of people trying to check for any updates regarding Donald Trump and such they were met with an image of an upside down ice cream cone, along with the caption “Uh-oh, something went wrong. Please try again.” People came for news, and all they got was a picture of some ice cream, what a day. 

Doing as instructed and trying again wouldn’t have yielded any results, as it seems the issue was with Google itself. Downdetector shows that Google News experienced a spike in outages around 8 a.m. ET on May 31st.

Is Google News back up?

According to Downdetector, it is now back up and running as usual. I had a quick check myself and can confirm the news has returned, hooray! The problem seems to have been mostly sorted by around 9:47 a.m. ET May 31st, less than two hours after the initial peak. Although Downdetector still showed a few outage reports, it’s only a handful now.

What happened?

Google confirmed in a post to X (formerly Twitter) that “There’s an ongoing issue with serving some features in Google Search,” however, it confirmed at the time that the issues had been identified and were being dealt with. 

Although we weren’t given specific details about what the issue was it seems it’s pretty much been sorted now. A later post confirmed the issue affected “Google News, Discover and other products,” and another post shortly after confirmed the issue had since been resolved. Now it just needs to sort out the Google AI bugs — or get rid of updates altogether.