YouTube suffered a widespread global outage on Tuesday, leaving hundreds of thousands of users across the globe — including in the UK, India, and the United States — unable to load videos or access various platform services.
Early on, Google acknowledged the technical issues via its @TeamYouTube account on X, stating: “We’re aware some of you are having issues accessing YouTube right now. Our teams are aware, and we’ll provide updates as soon as we have them.”
According to a later update on their help page, the disruption stemmed from "an issue with our recommendations system," which prevented videos from appearing across all surfaces, including the homepage, the mobile app, YouTube Music, and YouTube Kids.
While the company confirmed that the homepage functionality had been restored, they noted at the time that they were "still working on a full fix."
According to outage tracking site Downdetector, complaints spiked dramatically worldwide. In the US, over 320,000 users experienced issues at the peak of the outage, while in India, more than 19,000 complaints were registered in mere minutes during the morning, which underscored the worldwide impact of the outage.
Users complained of being stuck in loops of "something went wrong" errors, videos failing to buffer, and being unable to open the app or website. The high number of complaints about YouTube TV and other Google products indicated a platform-wide issue.
Downdetector relies on user-submitted data and other variables to identify patterns of disruption, which meant that the number of affected users was likely higher than the number reflected.
As the world's largest video-sharing platform with over 2.5 billion monthly active users, the impact was global, with social media platforms filled with posts about simultaneous access failures.
Also read: Snapchat disables 4,15,000 accounts in Australia
Follow us
