New Delhi/Washington: A widespread outage disrupted YouTube on Wednesday, affecting users across multiple countries, including India and the United States, with hundreds of thousands reporting issues ranging from videos failing to load to repeated error messages.
Users encountered app crashes and persistent “something went wrong” prompts, while many said videos were not appearing on the homepage or within the app. The disruption also impacted YouTube Music, YouTube Kids, and YouTube TV.
Outage tracking platform Downdetector reported that more than 320,000 users in the United States flagged issues at the peak of the disruption. In India, over 19,000 complaints were logged during the morning hours, indicating the outage was global in scope rather than region-specific.
Early in the disruption, parent company Google acknowledged the issue through TeamYouTube on social media, stating that its teams were investigating and would provide updates.
Subsequently, YouTube clarified on its help page that the outage stemmed from an issue within its recommendations system, which prevented videos from appearing across multiple surfaces, including the homepage and main app interface. While the homepage was later restored, engineers continued working toward a full resolution.
With more than 2.5 billion monthly active users worldwide, YouTube remains the largest video-sharing platform globally, making the outage one of the most significant service disruptions in recent months.
