is youtube down? Service briefly interrupted by recommendations glitch, now restored
Users around the world experienced a widespread interruption to the video service on Tuesday evening, with many unable to see videos or use key features. The company traced the problem to its recommendations system and rolled out a fix the same night.
What happened and when
The disruption began Tuesday around 8: 00 p. m. ET, when large numbers of users reported problems accessing the service’s app and website. Affected viewers described landing on a largely blank homepage or encountering missing video results; search, uploads and personalized recommendations were also hit.
Over the next two hours the company provided a running series of updates. At 9: 15 p. m. ET it indicated that access was returning for some users. Shortly after, at 9: 26 p. m. ET, the company identified the root cause as an issue with its recommendations system that prevented videos from appearing across its surfaces. By 10: 19 p. m. ET the issue had been resolved and normal service was restored.
Scale of the outage and who was affected
Tracker tools logged hundreds of thousands of user error reports in the U. S. during the peak of the disruption, with global reports also coming from Canada, the UK, India, Brazil, Germany, Australia and Mexico. Counts vary by tracker — some recorded more than 800, 000 U. S. reports while others peaked in the low hundreds of thousands — underscoring the broad, but uneven, nature of the impact.
The interruption affected people using both the desktop site and mobile apps, as well as various client surfaces such as TV apps. Creators reported difficulty uploading content and checking analytics while the fault persisted. For many end users the visible symptom was a homepage or search result page that failed to populate video thumbnails and recommendations.
Company response and what users should do
The company acknowledged the outage publicly and provided staged updates throughout the evening as engineers worked to restore functionality. The technical team traced the problem to the recommendations system and deployed a fix that brought homepage and recommendation features back first, followed by full restoration across all services.
For users who still encounter issues after the company’s update, basic troubleshooting steps remain useful: refresh the page or app, clear local cache, restart devices and check that the app is updated to the latest version. If problems persist, restarting home streaming devices or smart TVs can help. Creators experiencing upload or analytics delays should allow time for systems to fully process activity after the fix was implemented.
The outage highlights how centralized recommendation and discovery systems are critical to the viewing experience; when those systems fail, the surface can appear mostly blank even though the underlying video files remain intact. Service availability returned to normal the same night, and teams would continue monitoring to prevent recurrence.
