youtube down: Major video platform outage leaves users scrambling

On February 17, 2026 a major video service experienced a multi-hour outage that left many users unable to load the website or app. The disruption peaked in the evening hours and prompted mass reports to outage trackers and frustrated viewers looking for answers.

What happened and when

Initial trouble began to spike at about 8: 30 PM ET, with users across the U. S. noting failures to load home pages, blank feeds, or error messages reading "Error, try again. " The outage persisted for multiple hours; some users regained access within the evening while others continued to see issues into the following day. An outage-tracking service showed several distinct surges in problem reports through the afternoon and evening, with counts moving from the low hundreds earlier in the day to many thousands at the height of the disruption.

Where the outage hit hardest and the scale of the disruption

The West Coast of the United States registered the largest concentration of trouble reports, but complaints came from multiple regions. The outage tracker logged sizable spikes in reports around mid- to late-afternoon ET and again into the evening. At various points those trackers recorded hundreds of thousands of reports nationally, and ancillary services tied to the same ecosystem showed elevated report totals as well. For many users the most common symptoms were a blank homepage, inability to play videos, or app instability; others could still search but found results missing or incomplete.

How to fix lingering problems on your device

With broad restoration under way for much of the user base, many remaining problems are local to individual devices. Try these steps in order to clear a stuck or broken session:

• Hard refresh your browser: on Windows use Control + F5, on Mac use Command + Shift + R. This forces the browser to reload all content rather than serve a cached snapshot from when the service was down.
• Restart the app: on mobile, swipe the app away from recent apps and reopen it. On desktop, fully quit the browser and relaunch.
• Clear cached data: if a hard refresh didn’t help, clear cached images and files from your browser settings. On mobile, clear the app cache or reinstall the app to ensure no corrupted data remains.
• Check for updates: make sure the app and your device OS are up to date. In some outages older client versions can misbehave when backend systems shift during recovery.

If problems continue after these steps, try switching networks (for example, from Wi‑Fi to cellular) or rebooting your router. In many cases these simple measures resolve the behavior of a single device that is holding onto stale outage information.

What to expect next

Outage-reporting counts trended down after the peak, signaling widespread recovery, but occasional stragglers are common after a large incident. When systems come back online, cached sessions and intermediate network caches may still serve older error pages to some users for a short time. If the situation changes or additional service impacts emerge, outage trackers typically register fresh surges of activity; meanwhile, following the troubleshooting steps above will resolve most leftover problems for individual users.

Filmogaz will monitor developments and provide updates if new disruptions occur.