youtube down: Major outage disrupts service for hours, partial recovery reported
On Feb. 17, 2026, a widespread outage left users unable to load videos or access the app for extended periods. The disruption began to spike in the evening on the U. S. West Coast and produced intermittent reports throughout the day, with many users seeing service return by mid-afternoon ET while others still encountered errors.
Timeline and scope of the disruption
The first notable surge of user reports was tracked around 8: 30 PM ET, when users on the U. S. West Coast started to encounter failures loading video pages and app errors. Earlier in the afternoon, a real-time outage tracker showed 638 reports at 2: 00 PM ET, and a later snapshot at 3: 59 PM ET recorded 591 reports. Numbers fluctuated through the day: at one point the tracker rose above 900 reports, and later readings landed near 986 and roughly 1, 024 reports as users filed straggling incidents.
While many accounts returned to normal operation by mid-afternoon ET, the pattern of peaks and dips in reports suggested the outage was not uniform. Some regions and individual users continued to experience intermittent failures or persistent cached errors after service restoration elsewhere.
Who was affected and what users saw
The outage affected both the website and mobile apps, producing common error messages such as generic "try again" prompts, pages that would not finish loading and videos that failed to play. The U. S. West Coast registered a higher concentration of issues during the initial spike, but incidents were logged across multiple areas, indicating a broad, if uneven, impact.
Because the problem affected core delivery for some users while leaving others untouched, many encountered confusion: a service that appeared fully functional to one viewer could be unreachable for a neighbor. That inconsistency is often the result of staggered failures across routing, caching layers or regional infrastructure rather than a universal shutdown.
Practical steps for users and what to expect next
For users still seeing problems after the outage subsided, simple device-side steps resolve most lingering issues. Start with a hard refresh on desktop—Control + F5 on Windows or Command + Shift + R on a Mac—to force the browser to load fresh site data. On mobile, swipe the app away from recent apps and reopen it to clear a stuck session.
If problems persist, clear the browser or app cache. On desktop, open your browser settings, find browsing data or history, check cached images and files, and delete. On iOS and Android, navigate to the app settings or browser history and clear cached data. These actions remove any snapshot of the site or app saved mid-outage that might be causing repeat errors.
For most users the worst of the outage is now in the past and normal playback has returned. Expect residual reports to taper off as cached sessions flush and background systems finish reconciling. If issues continue for an extended period, restarting the device or testing on a different network can help isolate whether the problem is local to a device, network path or a lingering backend issue.
We will monitor developments and service signals through the day. For now, many viewers are back to watching uploads and livestreams, while a minority may need the cache-clearing steps above to get fully back online.
