If you used Google News to check up on the latest posts from Neowin or your other favorite websites earlier this morning, you might have been treated with a black page for results. Many people reported this situation on their social network accounts like Ajesh Nair did on his X account today.
Google News not working!!! Google News server down I guess!!#news #google #googlenews #server #down pic.twitter.com/TMtHlKsuMf
— Ajesh Nair (@AjeshNair101) May 31, 2024
The good thing is that Google seems to be aware of this problem. The company posted word at about 9:47 am Eastern time on its Google Search Status Dashboard website about this outage:
There"s an ongoing issue with serving some features in Google Search. We"ve identified the issue and we"re working on a fix.
The company clarified the issues in a post on its Google Search Liasion X account.
Features included some results on Google News, Discover and other products, for those who have asked about specific ones.
As of this writing, it looks like Google News results have started to return for many people since the initial outage reports, However, it looks like Google"s search development team is still trying to fix the problem for others.
This outage for Google News capped off a rather shaky last several days for the Search team. It started with reports that many of the new AI Overviews results that were put into Search in the US earlier this month were generating incorrect and often weird answers to search inquiries.
Google quickly sent out a statement saying that most of the answered created by AI Overviews in search "provide high-quality information". Late on Thursday, the company posted a more detailed look at how it developed AI Overviews. It added that it made some improvements since the launch a few weeks ago, including putting in limits for how AI Overviews gets results from user-generated content.