youtube down: Major outage disrupts service for hundreds of thousands
On February 17, 2026, a major outage left many users unable to access the world’s largest video service for hours. The disruption affected both the web interface and mobile apps, producing a patchwork of symptoms from blank homepages to playback errors. Engineers have restored access for most accounts, but reports of lingering problems continue.
What happened and who was hit
Initial reports of trouble began late afternoon on the U. S. West Coast, with user complaints spiking around 8: 30 p. m. ET. Problems ranged from the homepage failing to populate to videos refusing to play and error messages prompting users to "try again. " The outage did not appear limited to one device type: desktop browsers, Android and iOS apps all experienced interruptions during the peak of the incident.
Impact maps and status trackers registered a rapidly growing number of incident reports through the evening. Early in the day, the trackers showed only a few hundred incidents, but by late evening the count rose into the hundreds of thousands at peak. Separate tallies also flagged issues with the live-TV add-on service tied to the same account ecosystem, adding to the disruption for viewers who rely on linear broadcasts through the platform.
Scale, timeline and current status
Throughout the afternoon and evening, public trackers and user submissions painted a fast-moving picture. At one point in the late afternoon, a tracker showed only a few hundred reports, a sign that the problem was still emergent. Within a matter of hours the same trackers logged dramatic surges: hundreds of thousands of users flagged interruptions, and the total peaked at more than three quarters of a million at its worst.
By early evening ET the number of active reports began to fall as service restoration efforts took effect. Many users regained normal access, but smaller pockets of users continued to encounter errors. The overall trend moved from a widespread outage to isolated stragglers over several hours.
What to do if you're still affected
If the service appears broken on your device after the bulk of the outage has passed, don’t panic — local caching is often the culprit. Start with a quick refresh: on desktop, perform a hard refresh (Control + F5 on Windows or Command + Shift + R on Mac). On mobile, fully close the app from the recent apps view and reopen it.
If that doesn't fix the problem, clear cached data. On desktop, open the browser menu, choose delete browsing data, check cached images and files, and clear them. On mobile devices, clear the app cache system settings or uninstall and reinstall the app if needed. These steps force your device to fetch a fresh copy of the service instead of displaying a frozen snapshot from mid-outage.
Should problems persist after these steps, try an alternate device or network to determine whether the issue is local to your hardware or internet connection. Restarting your router or switching between cellular and Wi‑Fi can help isolate the cause. If multiple devices on the same network are affected while others are not, a local network reset is a useful next step.
Engineers restored normal operations for most users by the late evening, and the incident appears to have transitioned from a system-wide outage to sporadic residual issues. For the majority, service is now functioning; for those still seeing errors, the troubleshooting steps above resolve most cases.
Newsrooms will continue tracking follow-up information as engineers publish technical root-cause details and a final incident timeline. For now, viewers can expect improved stability and are advised to perform the simple fixes above if their account still behaves oddly.
