While a UFO lights up the skies of Southern California and a power plant implodes in Michigan, Google News stood still. The pause in the popular news aggregator has sent publishers and other newshounds pouring into the Google's product forums wondering if they've lost their minds.
Google News has been down for about a day, with the Nov. 6 seemingly frozen in time when looking at the downed site.
The site is critical to news outlets big and small, as it has become the hub for headlines pouring from around the globe. The site launched in 2002 with 4,000 news sites and, in 2013, counted more than 50,000.
It draws organic traffic, it puts small voices on the big stage, it lets large outlet set the tone and it helps keep the still-transitioning media afloat. So when Google news went down at some point on Friday, it was a big deal for the media.
The outage sent publishers piling into Google's product forum.
"It seems that Google News is suffering from some issue considering that none of its editions have updated for 3 hours now," said publisher Parity Media. "We have been submitting stories for two hours and none of them are being indexed by Google. Before anyone asks us to check the sitemap for errors and Google Search Console for crawl errors - we have done that! Anyone else noticed this?"
With support for 28 languages and a footprint in 45 countries, Google news sends over six billion viewers to news sites each month. That was 2013, the last time the search engine company shared data on Google News' traffic.
Tech Times has reached out to Google for comment (Nov. 8) and will update this story when a response is submitted.
Update: The issue appears to have been resolved. However, a Google spokesperson says the company is "checking into this."
