is youtube down — Service Restored After Evening Recommendation Glitch
Users worldwide faced intermittent failures accessing videos and homepage recommendations on Tuesday evening, Feb. 17. The disruption began around 8: 00 p. m. ET and affected multiple surfaces of the platform before engineers restored normal service later the same night.
What happened and when
The outage started at approximately 8: 00 p. m. ET on Tuesday, Feb. 17, when many users found videos failing to load and homepages showing limited or no content. Error reports spiked on outage-monitoring services, with dashboards showing hundreds of thousands of user complaints from the U. S. and other countries.
By 9: 15 p. m. ET the platform’s public feed indicated users were beginning to regain access, and a short time later the company named the cause: a problem in its recommendations system that prevented videos from appearing across its various surfaces. An update at 9: 26 p. m. ET said the homepage was back for many users while work continued on a full fix. The service was declared fully restored by 10: 19 p. m. ET.
How the outage affected users
During the blackout, attempts to load the main site or the mobile app often produced a dark or largely empty page with only navigation elements visible. Playback failures and missing suggested content left many users unable to discover or watch videos, and upload processes were also impacted for a period.
The interruption crossed regions, with reports emerging from North America, Europe, Latin America and other areas. At the outage’s peak, monitoring feeds recorded very high volumes of error submissions, reflecting widespread user disruption even if the exact number of affected accounts cannot be confirmed.
Cause, response and what to expect next
Engineers traced the disruption to a malfunction in the recommendations system — the component responsible for curating what appears on users’ homepages and in suggested feeds. That failure prevented videos from being surfaced properly rather than taking the service fully offline.
The company communicated updates through its official channels while teams worked on remediation. After the initial mitigation, further testing and adjustments continued until a full fix was announced late in the evening. Users who still experienced issues after the main announcement were advised to restart apps or reload pages while background systems settled back to normal operation.
Short interruptions like this can ripple across the ecosystem: creators who scheduled uploads or relied on timely recommendations saw disruption to reach and engagement metrics for the window of the outage. For viewers, the primary impact was an inability to discover and play content rather than a loss of account access.
Platform engineers have confirmed the recommendation service is functioning again and all major surfaces are back to normal. If similar problems reappear, users should monitor the platform’s official communications for the latest status updates and consider local troubleshooting steps such as clearing app cache, updating the app, or restarting devices.
