is youtube down? Widespread outage disrupts homepage and recommendations
If you tried to load the video platform on the evening of the outage, you weren’t imagining it: users across the U. S. encountered missing feeds, blank homepages and interrupted recommendation systems. The disruption began in the late evening ET hours and rapidly grew into a broadly felt outage that left core discovery features unavailable for many viewers.
What users experienced
The incident began around 7: 45pm ET and expanded quickly by 8: 00pm ET. Many users reported that the homepage failed to populate, subscription feeds and short-form streams were empty, and personalized recommendations were not appearing. In testing, both mobile and web interfaces showed limited discovery functionality. Direct video links and embedded players generally continued to load, suggesting playback and hosting systems were largely intact even as browsing and discovery surfaces were affected.
Some related services showed fewer issues. Live TV access and the music-focused apps appeared to remain accessible in many tests, though the disruptions were concentrated on the primary video discovery and recommendation pipelines. Outage trackers registered a large spike in problem reports, with hundreds of thousands of incidents logged as the outage spread.
Timeline and status update
Initial reports clustered around 7: 45pm ET, with the volume of complaints growing by 8: 00pm ET. By 8: 20pm ET, public outage monitors still showed a large number of active reports. Platform engineers indicated that a problem with the recommendation system prevented videos from appearing across multiple surfaces, including the homepage and app feeds.
Later in the evening the company communicated that the homepage was restored for many users, but that work remained underway to fully resolve recommendation issues. That partial recovery meant users could again reach the main landing surfaces, but personalized suggestions and some feed elements could remain inconsistent until a full fix is deployed.
What viewers and creators should know next
For viewers: if you see blank homepages or missing subscriptions, try accessing videos directly by link or through embedded players, which have generally continued to work. Clearing the app cache, restarting the app or reloading the page may help once engineers push fixes, but these steps won’t resolve backend recommendation issues.
For creators: uploads and video hosting were not broadly impacted, so new content should still be available by direct link. However, discoverability through automated recommendations and the standard homepage rotator may be reduced until the recommendation system is fully restored. Expect potential fluctuations in impressions and views tied to how quickly the platform resolves the recommendation pipeline.
What to expect next: engineering teams tend to prioritize restoring core browsing and discovery features, then follow with targeted fixes for recommendation and personalization layers. Given the partial restoration already announced, a full resolution could arrive in short order, but timing can vary depending on the root cause and cascading effects on related systems.
We will continue to monitor updates and note when the platform confirms a complete fix. In the meantime, relying on direct links or shared embeds remains the most reliable way to reach specific videos while recommendation services are still recovering.
