Google finally resolves widespread outage affecting search engine

Google said it has resolved the issues that caused a widespread service outage on Friday morning that affected its search engine, news feed and other products.

A spike in user reports regarding services outages on Google products occurred around 8 a.m. ET, according to Down Detector, a website that tracks online outages. More than 1,000 reports were posted as of 9 am ET and originated from locations across the US.

Google initially confirmed it had identified an “ongoing issue with serving some features in Google Search” on its service dashboard, but did not provide further details or address reports of problems with other products.

In a subsequent post on X, Google’s search liaison account said the glitch impacted “some results on Google News, Discover and other products, for those who have asked about specific ones.”

By noon ET, Google said “the issue has now been resolved.” The cause of the outage remains unclear.

The service outage prompted a wave of reaction from users on X and other platforms.

“Google News being broken feels extremely ominous,” journalist Louis Peitzman wrote on X.

“Everything Google seems to be down – search, news, calendar, etc…” one user wrote on Down Detector’s forum.

“News feeds are broken,” another user added.

The outage marked another headache for Google, which has scrambled to address issues related to troubled rollout of its AI-powered search engine feature, Overviews.

Critics slammed Google after AI Overviews began generating bizarre responses to user search queries, such as advising them to eat rocks or add glue to their pizza. Google said it was “taking swift action” to address the hiccups.

Elsewhere, Google confirmed the authenticity of thousands of documents related to its secretive search results algorithm. Some details appeared to contradict past public statements by Google regarding which factors are and are not used to calculate rankings.