Google News down temporarily around the globe

Google News and Discover features went down for users globally on Friday, causing widespread inconvenience to millions of users.

Users have taken to social media platforms like X (formerly Twitter) to report the disruption.

This is a serious development as Google services are known to be reliable and efficient. Especially, reports of Google News going down are few and far between.

According to Downdetector, a website that tracks outages of online sites and traffic, complaints of Google services coming to a halt have come from multiple locations in the US.

Google’s statement

The internet giant has come out with a statement acknowledging the disruption to its services and addressing the underlying cause.

Through a post on X, Google said that it has identified the problem which is causing the disturbance in several of its offerings. The company also stated that it is working hard to fix the issue and restore normal functionality.

As per Google, the features affected by the outage included Google News, Discover, and some other unspecified services.

However, the company did not disclose further details regarding the nature of the problem or whether it stemmed from an internal issue or external factors.

It also did not provide an estimate about how much time it would take for the issue to get completely fixed.

Notably, thousands of users in countries like India are also facing problems in accessing News and other services like Discover and Trends.

Meanwhile, several reports in the US media have confirmed that Google services are down, and it is causing inconvenience to users.

Search and updates

Earlier this month, Google had launched a new update to Search. This came in the form a web filter that allowed users to see only “text-based links.”

This feature can be accessed by clicking the filter located at the top of the results page alongside other filters or through the “More” option.

“We’ve added this after hearing from some that there are times when they’d prefer to just see links to web pages in their search results, such as if they’re looking for longer-form text documents, using a device with limited internet access, or those who just prefer text-based results shown separately from search features,” Google SearchLiaison said in a post on X.