Google’s news service suffered an outage on Friday afternoon, with users reporting that they were unable to see updates.

While the main search engine seemed to be unaffected, users who clicked on the “news” tab found no stories.

Instead, a message appeared on screen, which said: “Uh-oh! Something went wrong. Please try again.”

Social media users rushed to X, formerly Twitter, to report being unable to search the platform for news articles either on its desktop page or on its iOS and Android apps.

By 4.20pm, Google News appeared to be running as normal again.

In a post on X, the search engine said: “There’s an ongoing issue with serving some features in Google Search. We’ve identified the issue and we’re working on a fix.”

A related post on Google’s Search Status Dashboard showed the tech firm had been dealing with “disruption” to parts of its search engine since 3.36am UK time on May 31.

Third-party reports of Google News not working began to stream in later in the day at around 1pm, according to Down Detector, a website which monitors outages across the globe.

Reports of the outage then eased at around 2.45pm.

It is unclear how many users were hit, but Down Detector reported outages in the UK, the US and other countries, meaning it could have affected hundreds of millions of people.

Google has been approached for comment.