youtube outages interrupt service for hundreds of thousands before company says issue resolved
On Tuesday evening, a widespread disruption left a large number of users unable to access key parts of the video service, with the company confirming the issue was resolved by 10 p. m. ET. The outage, which spiked in reports shortly after 8 p. m. ET, affected both the website and mobile app and briefly interfered with login and recommendation features across the platform.
Scope and timeline of the outage
The disruption began to spike in user complaints around 8 p. m. ET on February 17, 2026. An unofficial, crowd-sourced outage tracker registered several hundred thousand problem reports at the peak of the incident, with many users saying the app experience was most affected. By about 10 p. m. ET the company posted that the issue had been fixed and that services across the site, the mobile app, the music tier, the children-oriented offering, and TV apps were back to normal.
During the outage, some visitors saw errors on the homepage while individual videos continued to load and play for many. A separate thread of login problems affected those trying to access the live-TV subscription tier; the login trouble was related to the broader disruption and that fixes were in progress for that component as well.
Cause, fix and guidance for lingering issues
The company attributed the interruption to a malfunction in its recommendations system. Engineers rolled out corrective changes through the evening and confirmed restoration once those updates took hold across the fleet of servers that power search, home feed generation, and personalized suggestions.
For users who still saw stale pages or error messages after the global fix, the standard troubleshooting steps helped clear residual problems. A hard refresh in a desktop browser or force-quitting and reopening the mobile app typically forces a fresh connection. Clearing cached data can also remove a snapshot of the site captured during the outage and resolve lingering display errors. If problems persist, a device restart or waiting a short while for systems to fully propagate is normally sufficient.
User impact and reaction
The outage had an immediate ripple effect: creators and viewers alike found home feeds and recommended videos missing or frozen, and some live-programming subscribers were briefly unable to log in. The interruption came during prime viewing hours for many U. S. time zones, prompting frustrated messages and widespread commentary online.
As service was being restored, users shared a mix of annoyance and humor, with creators noting the irony that an outage can become content fodder itself. The company's public update thanked users for patience while engineers worked through the issue and reassured viewers that normal service had resumed.
Major disruptions to large streaming services highlight how central algorithmic recommendation systems are to the daily experience for both viewers and creators. Even when core playback remains available, failures in discovery and personalization can effectively make the platform difficult to use for millions until the systems are corrected and caches refresh.
Engineers and network teams will likely continue post-mortem analysis to identify root causes and harden systems against similar outages in future. For now, the immediate impact appears to have been resolved, and normal viewing and content discovery functions are returning to users across devices.
