Is Google News down? Service suffers apparent outage across desktop and mobile apps

A monitoring service showed a surge in reports saying Google News was not working (Tim Goode/PA)

Google’s news service appeared to suffer an outage on Friday afternoon, with users reporting that they were unable to see updates.

Down Detector, a website which monitors outages across the globe, showed a surge in the number of reports that Google News was not working at around 1pm on May 31.

While the main search engine seemed to be unaffected, users who clicked on the “news” tab found no stories.

Instead, a message appeared on-screen, which said: “Uh-oh! Something went wrong. Please try again.”

Social media users rushed to X, formerly Twitter, to report being unable to search the platform for news articles either on its desktop page or on its iOS and Android apps.

It is unclear how many users were hit, but Down Detector reported outages in Ireland, Britain, the US and other countries, meaning it could have affected hundreds of millions of people.

The service still appeared to be unavailable at 2.10pm on Friday.

Google has been approached for comment.