A huge outage impacted YouTube worldwide with many users unable to access YouTube in countries like the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia. For many people, they could not access their video homepages or video content. Most users saw the YouTube app with a message saying something like "YouTube is experiencing issues."

Video outages throughout the world reached very high levels according to outage trackers, with literally hundreds of thousands of users around the globe posting about outage issues with YouTube, making it one of the largest YouTube service outages over the last few months.

Why did YouTube have an outage?

YouTube confirmed they were having some issues with their Recommendation System which allowed for videos to be presented in multiple locations (home page and within each of their apps). These systems helped to determine where to provide video resources such as the Home Page, Related Videos and Related Services.

YouTube said they were able to restore the home page but their engineers would continue to work to fully fix these issues suggesting that the outages continue to be experienced by some users.

Services impacted shared globally

YouTube’s service interruption caused problems for users reporting problems globally across the United States, Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom and Europe. The problems for users reported included:

YouTube homepage not loading/coming up blank

Missing videos in the Recommended and Subscription sections of accounts

“An error has occurred” error messages

YouTube app on mobile devices / smart TVs not functioning

Problems logging into Youtube TV / Streaming content

There were many reports of issues flooding social media worldwide. The overwhelming volume of simultaneous reports from users in these regions suggests a platform outage, rather than a regional network outage.

Users reacting via social media

Frustrated users posted screenshots, jokes and/or complaints about the service interruption on social media. Some users indicated only certain playlists worked while other users indicated that the sidebar opened, but there was no video in the main section of the page. Many commenters on social media stated that they could not believe YouTube appears to have service interruptions every peak period of usage.

Some users responded with humor and/or called the service interruption a “digital blackout” or stated that they now have a disruption to their daily routines because of the lack of YouTube.

Is YouTube working yet?

YouTube stated that there was a partial restoration of service and that the homepage had been restored; however, they stated that most systems were not yet fully restored. In addition, they encouraged users to continue to provide feedback concerning issues they are experiencing but indicated that problems are now primarily limited to geographic locations and that users may continue to have intermittent issues with YouTube, regardless of their service provider.

What to do if YouTube is still not working

If you continue to see errors:

  • Refresh the page or restart the YouTube app

  • Restart your device and check your internet connection

  • Clear app or browser cache and cookies

  • Disable VPNs temporarily

  • Update the YouTube app to the latest version

However, since this was a server-side issue, individual troubleshooting steps may not resolve the problem until YouTube completes its internal fixes.

Countries heavily impacted

Based on user reports, the outage was most noticeable in:

  • United States

  • United Kingdom

  • Canada

  • Australia

Complaints were also reported from other parts of the world, suggesting a global service disruption.