is youtube down? Service briefly disrupted Tuesday evening — what we know
Users worldwide experienced a disruption to the video platform on Tuesday evening, with problems beginning around 8: 00 p. m. ET and service restored later that night. The company traced the outage to a recommendation-system failure that prevented videos from appearing; engineers rolled out a fix and confirmed normal service by late evening.
Timeline: when the outage started and when it was fixed
Initial disruptions began at about 8: 00 p. m. ET on Tuesday, Feb. 17, when many users found homepages and recommendation feeds blank. Over the next two hours the situation fluctuated: partial restorations appeared for some users, while others still experienced missing thumbnails and empty home screens. The company posted an initial acknowledgement, followed by updates saying the homepage was back but that a full fix was still in progress. By 10: 19 p. m. ET the platform announced the issue had been resolved and that services were returning to normal.
What users experienced and how widespread it was
During the outage, many users saw a largely empty interface — search and sidebar elements remained, but video content and recommended tiles failed to load for large numbers of viewers. The disruption affected both the website and mobile applications, and it touched related services tied to the same backend systems.
Outage-tracking services registered a surge of error reports from across multiple countries. Numbers varied by the tracking method and the minute-by-minute snapshot, but U. S. reports reached into the low-to-mid hundreds of thousands at peaks, while global tallies climbed into the high hundreds of thousands. The issue was visible in North America, Europe, Latin America and parts of Asia and Oceania.
Root cause and current status
Engineers identified the root cause as a problem with the recommendations system that prevented videos from appearing across the platform’s surfaces. The initial mitigation brought the homepage back for many users, and a full remediation was deployed later in the evening to restore normal behavior for recommendations, search and uploads.
By the late-evening update at 10: 19 p. m. ET, the company confirmed the issue had been fixed and said the platforms were back to normal. Support teams noted that some users might continue to see intermittent behavior while caches and dependent systems fully synchronized; those issues typically clear within a short period after the main fix.
For users still experiencing problems after a platform-wide restoration, standard troubleshooting steps remain useful: refresh the page or app, clear local cache or app data, restart the device, and try switching between Wi‑Fi and cellular networks. The platform’s community and support pages are the primary places for ongoing status updates and guidance.
This outage follows a pattern where central recommendation and personalization systems are single points of failure for large-scale services; when they fail, the user-facing result is often that content does not load even though core account systems remain reachable. Engineers will likely investigate the sequence that led to the recommendation system breakdown to reduce the chance of similar incidents in the future.
We will continue to watch for any follow-up explanations and for statements about what changes will be made to prevent recurrence.
