Google Top Stories Images Broken & Blank

Google’s top stories carousel is not loading all the images for those articles. It seems like a bug is causing some of the images to not show up as of early this morning.

I’ve received numerous reports of this in the morning (I thought I’d sleep in until 6:30 since I am on a family vacation but this is big). I am able to replicate this, see the WSJ image not loading here (click to enlarge):

Here are other reports sent to me:

Is it a bug or Google filtering images related to specific Keywords @dannysullivan @JohnMu @rustybrick pic.twitter.com/Xp4X6aMxKB

— Rudra Kasturi (@kasturitagore) August 18, 2021

@dannysullivan – Top Stories article’s images are showing blank on Google.
It’s a temporary bug or any new practice we have to follow for news articles? @JohnMu @rustybrick @nishu_kadian pic.twitter.com/Bpng2trKhs

— Prakash pandey (@prakashpandey07) August 18, 2021

@searchliaison @dannysullivan @rustybrick
Google news carousel showing blank images today on desktop as well as mobile devices. is it a bug or SERP update? pic.twitter.com/HMerYoC2uY

— Soni Sharma (@soniseo) August 18, 2021

@rustybrick something unusual in Top Stories

No Featured image preview in “Top Stories”#GoogleNews #GoogleSearch #TopStories #Google #SEO #searchengineoptimization #searchengine pic.twitter.com/MQSchZ1qYo

— RAJDEEP DAS (@RajdeepDDigital) August 18, 2021

Hmm. Not sure what’s going on here. Across various SERP features on Google (top stories and tweet carousels in particular) I’m seeing image previews missing. Either blank or blurred out like pictured. Likely a bug but is quite strange… pic.twitter.com/zvayPrzoq3

— Brodie Clark (@brodieseo) August 18, 2021

The latest news stories are appearing without thumbnail images on Google Search. This is seen across all the Publishers. Is it another Google bug? Coincidentally there is a Google Discover traffic drop happening from yesterday. And we know Discover loves images.@glenngabe pic.twitter.com/oBxCKKTPta

— Dinesh Kumar (@dineshrockie) August 18, 2021

So this seems like a bug on Google’s end, tons of publishers are impacted and I suspect Google will fix this soon.

Forum discussion at Twitter.