Google said Friday morning it was experiencing a widespread outage affecting its search engine, news feed and other products and indicated it was working on a fix.
User reports of outages for Google products spiked around 8 a.m. ET. According to Downdetectora website that tracks online outages. As of 9 a.m. ET, more than 1,000 reports had been submitted from across the United States.
Google confirmed on its products dashboard that there were “ongoing issues with the delivery of some features in Google Search,” but did not provide details or address reports of issues with other products.
“We have identified the issue and are working on a fix,” the company said. “The next update will be available within the next 12 hours.”
The Washington Post has reached out to Google for further comment.
The outage sparked an outcry from users of X and other platforms.
“It feels very ominous that Google News is going down,” journalist Louis Peitzman wrote on X.
“Everything about Google seems to be down: search, news, calendar,” one user wrote on Down Detector’s forums.
“Newsfeed is broken,” added another.
The Washington Post has reached out to Google for further comment.
The outage will be a new headache for Google, which is scrambling to sort out issues with the rollout of its AI-powered search engine feature, Overviews.
Critics slammed Google after its AI Overview began generating bizarre responses to users’ search queries, such as advising them to eat stones or put glue on pizza. Google said it was “taking swift action” to address the issue.
Meanwhile, Google has confirmed the authenticity of thousands of documents related to its secret search result algorithm, with some details appearing to contradict Google’s past public statements about which factors are and aren’t used to calculate rankings.
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