Seems like Google is having difficulty keeping the Google News servers up. If you try Google News right now (at the time I am writing this), you will notice that it is returning a 503 server error. Here is a screen capture:

People on Twitter are Tweeting about it right now as well. The first tweet was at about 2:25pm (EST) and right now it is 3:00pm (EST).

No word from Google on the outage at this moment.

Update: at 3:05, about 40 minutes after Google News was first reported as down, it seems to be back online – at least for me.

Related Topics: Google: News

About The Author: Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here. For more background information on Barry, see his full bio over here. See more articles by Barry Schwartz