is youtube down? Widespread playback and login issues disrupt service
Thousands of users encountered playback failures, upload errors and sign-in problems during a service disruption that began early on February 18, 2026. The outage, first noted in the mid-morning hours ET, affected viewers and creators across multiple regions before partial restoration was observed later in the morning.
What happened and when
The first spikes in error reports appeared shortly after 9: 10 AM ET on February 18, 2026, when a growing number of viewers experienced videos failing to load or repeatedly buffering. Creators then flagged problems uploading new content and accessing analytics. By 10: 00 AM ET the issue had expanded, with intermittent login errors preventing some users from accessing their accounts or channel settings.
Engineers implemented mitigation steps through the morning. By about 11: 40 AM ET many users regained basic playback functionality and uploads began to clear. Despite the improvement, a subset of users continued to see degraded performance—delayed video processing, intermittent buffering and occasional authentication errors—into the early afternoon ET.
How users were affected and practical steps
Impact varied by location and connection, but three categories of issues stood out: playback failures, upload/processing delays and account access problems. Viewers commonly saw error messages or endless buffering wheels when trying to watch videos. Creators reported that new uploads either failed to start or were stuck at a processing stage, and some users could not sign in to manage channel settings.
If you are still facing trouble, try these troubleshooting steps:
- Refresh the page and clear your browser cache, then attempt playback again.
- Sign out and sign back in to refresh authentication tokens for account access.
- Restart your router or switch networks to rule out local connectivity issues.
- For uploads, try a lower-bitrate file or wait a short while and re-attempt the upload if processing stalls.
- Check whether playback works in an incognito/private window or a different browser to isolate extensions or cookies as the cause.
Persisting problems may be intermittent as engineers roll out fixes. Users relying on scheduled premieres or time-sensitive uploads should consider delaying until performance stabilizes or use alternative distribution plans where available.
Service status, root cause clues and what to expect next
Internal monitoring showed elevated error rates in several core services affecting content delivery and authentication. Mitigation measures reduced the majority of failures by late morning ET, but residual issues—particularly around video processing pipelines and certain authentication flows—remained for some users.
Investigations into complex outages typically continue for hours after visible service restoration. Engineers will likely run additional checks to verify the integrity of cached content, background processing queues and account data consistency. Users should expect intermittent instability as teams validate full recovery and deploy follow-up patches.
For now, most viewers are seeing restored playback, while creators may experience slower-than-normal processing for a short period. If fresh problems emerge, monitoring systems will detect them quickly; any broad reoccurrence would likely show up as new spikes in error reports within minutes.
We will continue tracking developments and will report updates if further disruptions occur or when official statements provide more detail on the root cause and timeline for full recovery.
