Update (May 31, 2:28 pm EDT): Google's service outage has been resolved.
What you need to know
- Google News began experiencing a worldwide outage on May 31, 2024, around 8 AM ET.
- Some other Google services, like Google Drive, have also displayed errors while trying to edit and create new documents.
- Users across the world have been reporting problems accessing these Google services, meaning it's not just a regional problem.
Friday might be a bit of a slow news day if you're a free Google News service user. As of 8 AM ET on Friday, May 31, 2024, users around the world began reporting issues accessing the Google News service, which aggregates news Google deems important to them.
The website Downdetector confirms the outage, which Android Central and Tom's Guide first noticed this morning. Visiting the Google News page will display upside down ice cream cones with a rather generic error of "Uh-oh, something went wrong. Please try again."
Outages like this happen from time to time but services as large and prolific as Google's often cause a larger wake than others may. It's not just Google News that's down— creating new documents in Google Drive has been throwing up errors, too, this morning, and our staff hasn't been able to get some two-factor authentication dialogs to appear on my phone, which also relies on Google services.
At the moment, Google Cloud services and Google Search services health dashboards don't show any problems, which is rather strange given the number of users having issues with Google services.
Android Central has reached out to Google about the outage but they did not get back to us in time for publication. We will update the article once we have more information.
Update
After several hours of downtime, it looks like Google's services are beginning to stabilize. Earlier today (May 31), Google News was down, displaying upside ice cream cones instead of your usual "Uh-oh, something went wrong" error.
Moreover, Google's Downdetector showed a massive spike in reports likely detailing the service outage this morning. That spike has since subsided, pointing toward Google's services finally showing signs of life. Users should also be able to hop back into their Drive accounts, as well, as that was previously affected this morning.
