Ryan Haines / Android Authority
TL;DR
- Google News and Google Discover faced a service outage today.
- The content stream that serves new content to Google News and allied services like Google Discover and the Discover feed in Google Chrome was likely affected, which is why all of these services were impacted and couldn’t serve new content.
- In a statement, Google confirmed the disruption has been solved.
Update, May 31, 2024 (12:50 PM ET): It looks like Google has fixed the issue described in the original article below. Here is a statement from the company:
There was an issue that was briefly affecting some results on Google News, Discover and other products. We’ve fixed the issue and things should be working normally now.
Original article, May 31, 2024 (09:29 AM ET): Google Discover is a key component of how Google delivers timely content to Android users. It resides on the left of the main home screen and is populated with news content alongside other content types. Google Discover has content that overlaps with Google News, which can be accessed through the dedicated tab in Google Search on mobile or web. If you relied on Google News or Google Discover, you will notice that neither of these services is currently working. It’s not just you: It seems both Google News and Google Discover are facing an outage.
As spotted by Seroundtable, the Google News tab is not returning results, seemingly due to an outage. The outage extends to the Google Discover home page, which is no longer showing any news content and is instead falling back to commercial content elements like shopping items. Google Trends also appears to have been impacted.
I can confirm that Google News returns no results for queries that have shown results in the past.
Aamir Siddiqui / Android Authority
I see a similar situation with the Google Discover screen on my Android phone too. There is no news content that it is able to pull. All I see are four product boxes that you see in the screenshot below:
Aamir Siddiqui / Android Authority
This is also impacting other areas that pull in from Google News, like the Discover feed within Chrome, which is now showing as “No stories available.” Other products that pull in content from the same news feeds are also likely to have been impacted.
Google Search’s Status Dashboard confirms that “there is an ongoing issue with serving some features in Google Search.” The company has identified the issue and is working on a fix.
We’ve contacted Google for a statement and more information on this outage. We’ll update this article if and when we hear back from them.
Is Google News working for you? What about Google Discover? Let us know in the comments below!
