It wasn’t your Wi-Fi – YouTube crashed worldwide for hundreds of thousands of users

If you were struggling to catch up on your favourite YouTube channels last night, you weren’t suffering alone. The platform had a rare global outage that stopped videos showing up properly across multiple parts of the service, with users reporting blank homepages, loading failures, and an ominous “something went wrong” message.

Reports began spiking late on Tuesday evening in the US – around 7.50pm ET (12.50am GMT) – with outage tracker Downdetector showing a surge that climbed into the hundreds of thousands. The exact peak varies by source, but it was big enough to register as a major disruption across multiple regions, including the US and UK.

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Why was YouTube down?

Google later confirmed the issue was caused by a fault in YouTube’s recommendations system – the bit that decides what to show you and lures you into a rabbit hole of endless videos till 3am – which stopped doing its job. 

As a result, videos weren’t appearing as they should on the main YouTube website, the mobile app, and even spin-off apps like YouTube Music and YouTube Kids – much to the chagrin of parents trying to carve out a few moments of peace during the school holidays.

Is YouTube back now?

For most people, yes. Multiple reports say service returned after the disruption, and YouTube indicated things were back to normal. Later in the night, Google said a small number of users were still unable to log into YouTube TV, adding that this was tied to the wider incident.

For what it’s worth, we’ve just tested it on desktop and mobile in the morning here in the UK, and things appear as they should, so it’s back to the regular cat videos and pastry chef ASMR videos on our end.

If your homepage is alive again but you’re still seeing odd behaviour in certain corners of the app, it likely isn’t just you – it’s the after-effects of a platform-wide fix rolling through. Fingers crossed it’ll all go back to normal for you soon, if it hasn’t already.

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Esat Dedezade Contributor

About

Esat has been a gadget fan ever since his tiny four-year-old brain was captivated by a sound-activated dancing sunflower. From there it was a natural progression to a Sega Mega Drive, a brief obsession with hedgehogs, and a love for all things tech. After 7 years as a writer and deputy editor for Stuff, Esat ventured out into the corporate world, spending three years as Editor of Microsoft's European News Centre. Now a freelance writer, his appetite for shiny gadgets has no bounds. Oh, and like all good human beings, he's very fond of cats.