YouTube is back up and running after a rare global outage that left millions of users unable to access videos across the platform.

The disruption began around 7:50 p.m. ET (12:50 a.m. GMT), when reports of issues surged worldwide. In the United States alone, more than 280,000 users flagged problems, with over 30,000 reports coming from the United Kingdom. YouTube TV was also affected, compounding frustration for viewers.

Users attempting to open the app or website were met with blank homepages or a “Something went wrong” error message. For many, videos simply failed to load, sparking confusion across social media as people questioned whether the platform was truly down.

Google later confirmed the outage was caused by “an issue with our recommendations system” that prevented videos from appearing across multiple surfaces, including the YouTube homepage, the main app, YouTube Music and YouTube Kids. Because the recommendations system powers much of what users see when they open the platform, the issue had widespread effects.

As engineers worked on a fix, reports on outage-tracking site Downdetector began to decline, signaling progress. Google announced that the homepage had been restored for most users, though it acknowledged that a full fix was still in progress. Some users continued experiencing minor issues, including problems with YouTube Shorts and logging into YouTube TV.

Within hours, reports dropped to near-normal levels, indicating that the worst of the outage had passed. While brief service disruptions are not uncommon for major tech platforms, outages of this scale are rare for YouTube, making the incident one of the most significant service interruptions for Google in recent memory.

For now, the platform appears stable again, with most users able to stream, browse and log in as usual.

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