is youtube down? Platform outage on Feb. 17 traced to recommendation system glitch

Users around the world experienced disruption on the video platform beginning around 8: 00 p. m. ET on Tuesday, Feb. 17. The problem left many unable to see videos on home pages and in recommendations; the company confirmed the root cause was a fault in its recommendations system and said the issue was resolved later that night.

Timeline of the disruption

The outage began at roughly 8: 00 p. m. ET when large numbers of users started seeing blank or partially blank home pages on both the website and mobile apps. Early in the event, attempts to load the site returned a mostly black screen showing only navigation elements and a search field while video content failed to populate.

• ~8: 00 p. m. ET — Widespread reports of missing videos and blank home pages began to spike.
• 9: 15 p. m. ET — Signs of partial recovery appeared for some users, with intermittent access to content.
• 9: 26 p. m. ET — The platform identified the problem as an issue with its recommendations system and said the homepage was returning for many users, though work on a full fix continued.
• 10: 19 p. m. ET — The company announced that the incident had been resolved and that all services were back to normal.

Scale and user impact

Outage-tracking tools captured a surge of error reports as the incident unfolded, with totals ranging from several hundred thousand to near a million reports worldwide at the peak. A significant share of complaints came from users in the United States, but reports also came in from Canada, Britain, Germany, India, Australia, Brazil and Mexico.

Problems were not limited to the main video site. Mobile apps, smart-TV apps and music or kids-focused surfaces within the platform registered degraded access for many users. Some users were still able to perform keyword searches and watch content when they navigated directly to known video URLs, but the primary discovery surfaces — home pages and recommended feeds — were the most affected.

Cause, response and guidance for users

The company attributed the disruption to an internal recommendations-system error that prevented videos from appearing across the platform’s surfaces. Engineers moved to contain and correct the fault once it was identified, first restoring visible content to the homepage and then rolling out a full resolution later in the evening.

Customer support teams had limited additional information during the incident while engineers focused on remediation. After the fix was deployed, the company confirmed that the main website, mobile apps and related service surfaces were operating normally.

If you still encounter issues after an outage notice, standard troubleshooting steps can help: restart the app or browser, clear the app cache, reboot the device, and ensure the app is updated to the latest version. If problems persist, waiting briefly while the platform completes background recovery steps is often the simplest path to restoration.

This outage underscores how critical recommendation infrastructure is to the overall user experience. When recommendation systems fail, the discovery layer that most viewers rely on can become unusable even if the underlying video files remain accessible.

We will continue to track follow-up details as they emerge and will publish further updates if the company provides more technical information or post-incident findings.