youtube down: Major outage disrupts video service for hours

On Feb. 17, 2026, a large-scale outage interrupted access to the video streaming service for users around the world, with the brunt of disruption felt on the U. S. West Coast. The interruption affected both the website and mobile app and produced widely varying counts of user reports throughout the day and evening.

Scope and timeline of the outage

Early signs of trouble began to spike in the early evening Pacific window, with an initial surge of user complaints emerging around 5: 30 p. m. PT (8: 30 p. m. ET). Through the afternoon and into the evening, crowdsourced outage monitors logged fluctuations in the number of affected users. At 3: 59 p. m. ET one monitoring feed registered 591 outage reports, while earlier that afternoon a similar monitor showed 638 reports at 2: 00 p. m. ET.

As the situation evolved, larger aggregates of user complaints climbed dramatically. By roughly 8: 24 p. m. ET, a separate tracker showed hundreds of thousands of reports, and the total count continued to rise in rapid succession—moving from several hundred thousand reports to figures approaching the high six figures by late evening. For many users, the homepage failed to populate, while others could still run searches but encountered blank feed pages or error messages such as "Error try again. " The U. S. West Coast registered the highest concentration of trouble tickets during the primary surge.

Service levels began to stabilize for a majority of users later in the cycle, and many people regained access within hours. Still, intermittent and lingering problems persisted for some devices and accounts after the primary outage subsided.

Why numbers varied and what users saw

Outage counts differed widely because multiple monitoring services collect user submissions in different ways and at different speeds. Some feeds captured smaller local spikes earlier in the afternoon, while broader aggregates reflected a later, much larger swell of complaints from around the globe. That explains the sizable gap between early-afternoon counts in the low hundreds and evening totals that reached into the hundreds of thousands for a period.

On affected devices users described a range of symptoms: a blank or incomplete homepage, broken video playback, app crashes, and persistent error dialogs. For many the platform’s search function continued to return results even when the main home feed would not load.

Practical fixes for users still affected

If you still see errors after others have regained access, the issue may be a cached or stale version on your device. Try these steps in order to restore normal operation:

• Do a hard refresh in your browser: on Windows press Control + F5, or on a Mac press Command + Shift + R.
• Force-quit and relaunch the mobile app: remove it from your recent apps list and reopen it.
• Clear the browser or app cache: on desktop use your browser’s delete browsing data function and remove cached images and files; on mobile, use the app settings or the browser history menu to clear cached content.
• Restart your device if problems persist—this can clear lingering network or application state issues.

If none of these steps work, wait a short time and try again. Many remaining complaints after a large outage are caused by clients holding onto a broken snapshot of the service; a fresh connection usually resolves the problem.

The outage on Feb. 17 tested resilience and monitoring systems; while service returned for most users within hours, the event produced highly variable report counts and left a minority of users troubleshooting residual issues into the evening. If problems continue on your device after following standard fixes, expect gradual improvements as caches clear and traffic normalizes.