While Google Now is primarily an Android Jelly Bean property, those in the root world have had access to Google Now ports for ICS and may be seeing errors, as well.
There’s no word yet on what the cause may be for the outage, although as the product is very new there’s a good chance the outage was simply growing pains being taken care of before they reared their ugly head.
This does highlight a lack of detailed error reporting in Google Products that ought to be addressed. The error (shown in the picture) is pretty useless for attempting to figure out what is going on.
While some are reporting the service is back and running, for a few (myself included), it appears that it’s still down. Your situation may vary.
[Android Central]