YouTube global outage: Google issues update, says ‘still working on a full fix’

YouTube suffered a widespread global outage on Wednesday (18 February) early morning and Tuesday (17 February) night, leaving users across several countries, including India and the United States, unable to load videos or access key features on the platform.

The disruption triggered a surge in complaints, with hundreds of thousands reporting problems ranging from blank homepages to failures in video playback and access to linked services such as YouTube Music and YouTube Kids.

Google later said the issue was caused by a malfunction in YouTube’s recommendations system, which stopped videos from appearing across multiple parts of the service.

“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 – more coming soon!”

Earlier, as reports of the YouTube outage spread, Google acknowledged the disruption and said teams were working to restore access.

“Hi everyone, 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. Thanks, TeamYouTube.”

Outage monitoring platform Downdetector recorded a sharp spike in complaints from users around the world. In the United States, more than 320,000 reports were logged at the height of the disruption. India also saw a sudden surge, with over 19,000 complaints registered within minutes during the morning hours, reinforcing that the outage was global in scale rather than confined to a single region.

How are netizens reacting to YouTube outage?

“The good engineers and ops people were either assigned to AI work or AI was assigned to do their work. This is the result,” wrote a user on Reddit.

“It’s Tuesday. Most websites do server maintenance on Tuesday. They’re probably doing a really bad update,” added another user.

“YouTube has been slow and buggy as shit for me the past 3 or 4 days. Guess the problems finally compounded,” stated another user.

“Mine just says something went wrong, no history or anything. Fire Stick shows my account then tells me to login, trying to relogin shows success then rinse repeat, so seems things are getting worse. YouTube TV is still up without issues though,” yet another user added.

Some users also said that YouTube was even down in Canada. One such user wrote, “Down in Australia. Doesn’t load the homepage or profile. I can still access direct link videos. Tried with different devices and accounts.”