is youtube down? Service briefly disrupted Tuesday evening, now restored

Users worldwide experienced a disruption to YouTube beginning around 8: 00 p. m. ET on Tuesday. The interruption primarily affected the homepage and recommendation features, leaving many viewers unable to find or play videos. The company pushed updates through the evening and confirmed a full resolution before midnight ET.

What happened and when

Problems began to surface at roughly 8: 00 p. m. ET, when users started seeing blank or partially loaded homepages and missing recommendations across the web and app interfaces. Outage-tracking services recorded large spikes in error reports from the U. S. and multiple other countries, with one tracker logging roughly 838, 000 U. S. reports at peak and others registering figures in the low hundreds of thousands.

Initially, the operator acknowledged the incident and later identified the root cause as an issue with its recommendations system that prevented videos from appearing across service surfaces. A first recovery step — restoring the homepage — was announced at 9: 26 p. m. ET. Engineers continued work on a complete fix, and the company declared the incident resolved at 10: 19 p. m. ET.

Scope and user impact

The disruption affected multiple client surfaces including the main website, mobile apps, music and kids interfaces, and TV apps. Many users reported being able to access search and individual video pages intermittently, but discovery through the homepage and personalized recommendations was the most widely impacted function.

Geographically the incident was broad. Reports came from North America, Europe, Latin America and parts of Asia and Oceania. At the height of the outage, creators experienced upload delays and some playback issues; in several cases, users saw only the platform’s sidebar and search bar while the central video feed remained blank.

What users should know now

By late evening the service had restored core functionality and confirmed that the recommendations system issue had been resolved. Most users should now see normal behavior across web, mobile and TV apps; anyone still experiencing problems is encouraged to restart the app or browser and retry accessing content.

Outages of this scale are typically addressed through staged rollouts and monitoring to ensure the fix holds. Operators often continue internal checks after a public restoration to prevent recurrence and to understand what went wrong. Users reliant on the platform for live events, uploads or business operations should monitor their own analytics and reattempt uploads if necessary.

This disruption serves as a reminder of how central recommendation engines and discovery features are to modern streaming services — when those systems falter, the impact feels immediate and widespread even if underlying playback infrastructure remains intact.

We will monitor for any follow-up statements and further technical detail from the service as it becomes available.