YouTube experiences widespread outage worldwide

YouTube is suffering a massive outage that appears to be affecting video playback and access to the service’s core features. It looks as though both the website and mobile apps for the service are down, with a number of users saying they can’t get to the homepage, open subscriptions, or play any videos.

What users are seeing during the YouTube outage

Common symptoms include a blank or nearly empty homepage (seen in the screenshot at the bottom), long-loading spinners on the video player, and error messages including “Something went wrong” or “Playback error.” A few people report that search works sporadically or on some results, but if one taps through to any actual result, it hangs up or fails. The outage seems to affect all types of accounts and regions, and switching devices often doesn’t resolve the issue.

The problem also impacts embeds on third-party platforms and smart TV apps, indicating there may be something freezing up the floodgates upstream from individual publishers. On the few occasions when they do load, the streams never start — which is more indicative of server-side issues than local-ish connectivity trouble.

Scope and scale of the disruption affecting YouTube

Outage trackers indicate an unusually high volume of complaints… The collective reports during that time period have been high enough to make this one of the biggest recent disruptions for YouTube, according to Downdetector. Social media is awash with complaints of failures from North America to Europe, Asia, and elsewhere — revealing this to be a global rather than regional event.

For perspective, YouTube reaches more than two billion logged-in users a month and sees over a billion hours of watch time each day. A brief outage even has a ripple effect on live streams, premieres, and scheduled uploads, impacting creators, advertisers, and viewers at scale.

Possible causes and early symptoms of the outage

YouTube has not provided an official explanation for the outage. Not a lot of websites are equipped to withstand the kind of traffic that brought down Reddit, and historically, these sorts of things tend to be related to server-side problems — a misconfigured content delivery network, an errant software rollout, DNS or routing changes, authentication failures. Configuration changes as an inevitable cause of cascading failures are mentioned in post-incident analysis reports by some large web platforms and infrastructure providers.

The timing is interesting, given that YouTube just began a visual refresh of its player and interface with redesigned controls and layout tweaks. There is no official confirmation that the UI changes are related, but major updates do also occasionally come with backend updates that can happen to expose well-hidden bugs under peak load.

Why the YouTube outage matters for creators and viewers

For creators, the downtime derails premieres, live chats, and ad serving that can hit revenue and momentum on videos that feed off a strong launch window. For advertisers, paused campaigns and missed impressions further muddy pacing and performance benchmarks. Broadcasters currently using YouTube for simulcasts and sports highlights are experiencing audience falloff when streams don’t start.

Adding to the mainstreaming force is the platform’s scale. The site is a gateway for music, gaming, education, and news discovery; during outages the audience frequently disperses to similar short-form alternatives or to podcasts or even rival streaming services. Most viewers do come back when service returns, but creators can lose watch time velocity that feeds recommendation systems.

What users can do right now during the ongoing outage

While a platform-level outage rages, there’s no universal fix for the issue at hand, but a few steps can help verify what’s happening.

• Test on another device or network to rule out local connectivity issues.
• Clear the app’s cache or use an incognito window to avoid outdated cookies.
• Avoid reinstalling the app repeatedly — when it is a real server-side problem, this won’t help and may also trash offline content.

For some premium users, downloaded videos will sometimes play if the app opens at all, but new streams and recommendations could fail. Official announcements usually come on the Google Workspace Status Dashboard, the YouTube Help Community, and/or the TeamYouTube account across major social channels.

What to watch for next as service recovers in stages

Big incidents frequently settle down in steps: partial restoration, wider recovery as engineers unwind changes, rewarm caches, and rebalance traffic across regions. Once order has been restored, most large platforms will release an incident summary or a full post-mortem with root cause and prevention steps.

If past experience is any guide with previous large-scale outages across the web, service will likely return before a full explanation does. The main thing to test for is whether home feeds begin repopulating, watch pages load reliably, and live streams reconnect without errors. For now, it would be wise to have patience — this seems to be a centralized issue versus something end users can address themselves.