YouTube Outage Today: YouTube suffered a massive outage on Wednesday morning — with tens of thousands flagging technical glitches. The issues appeared primarily for app users with a smaller number of people facing difficulties while accessing videos via YouTube TV and the web browser. The streaming site later reported “an issue with its recommendations system” that had prevented videos from appearing on the screen.
Internet monitoring site Downdetector indicated that nearly 340,000 users had reported issues while trying to access YouTube. The complaints began around 6:00 am and persisted for more than an hour before falling sharply around 7:30 am. Many users had noted that the ‘skeleton’ of the site was loading while the actual content (such as thumbnails and video feeds) remained missing.
The numbers shown on Downdetector are based on user-submitted reports and the actual number of affected individuals may vary. Reports indicate that the outage affected multiple countries including India, the US, Britain, Australia, and Mexico.
Why was YouTube down?
“An issue with our recommendations system prevented videos from appearing across surfaces on YouTube (including the homepage, the YouTube app, YouTube Music and YouTube Kids). The homepage is back, but we’re still working on a full fix. We’re also seeing a small number of reports that some people are unable to login to YouTube TV. This is related to the broader issue across YouTube, and we’re also working on a fix here,” the company shared an hour after its initial acknowledgement.
A follow-up message around 9:05 am added that the issue with the recommendations system “has been resolved”. The update from Google reiterated that all linked platforms (YouTube.com, the YouTube app, YouTube Music, Kids, and TV) were now back to normal.