Is Google News down? Users fuming over major outage leaving popular site ‘broken’ for more than an hour

GOOGLE News suffered an outage leaving users with a mysterious “something went wrong” error message for more than an hour today.

The site shows a curation of the latest news stories from across the world.

People attempting to access the service were left with a blank page showing no news links.

None of the subject pages, nor the personalised “For you” tab, worked either.

But the main Google Search engine continued to function as normal.

A spike in complaints on social media started to appear around 13.30 BST / 08:30 ET with reports across the globe.

The Down Detector site experienced a jump in reports, peaking at more than 1,700.

“well… the google news tab is officially just completely broken,” one user wrote.

“Is Google news search broken or not working for anyone else? Every search yields no results,” another commented.

A third added: “Google News being broken feels extremely ominous.”

The reason for the outage is not yet clear but Google News returned as normal little after 14.30 BST / 09.30 ET.

AI issues

The outage came amid a tough couple of weeks for Google after its brand new AI search engine feature was ridiculed for spewing incorrect information.

AI Overviews falsely claimed Obama was the first Muslim US president, as well as recommending staring into the sun, using glue as a pizza topping and eating a rock a day to keep the doctor away.

In a blog post on Thursday, Google Search boss Liz Reid blamed the errors on so-called “data voids” and people making up odd questions.

“There’s nothing quite like having millions of people using the feature with many novel searches,” she said.

“We’ve also seen nonsensical new searches, seemingly aimed at producing erroneous results.”