Is YouTube Still Down? Live Updates on YouTube Outage
As people settled into prime time on the US East Coast and the end of the workday in the West, YouTube appeared to be taking a nap as more than 800,000 people in the US and hundreds of thousands elsewhere around the world reported losing the stream, according to Downdetector. The outage began gaining momentum at 5 p.m. PT and quickly reached 338,308 reports by 5:10 p.m., according to Datadetector’s chart.
As of 6:30 p.m. PT, the number of reports had dropped to less than 50,000. Google (which owns YouTube) provided a status update naming an “issue with our recommendations system that was preventing videos from appearing across YouTube surfaces (including the home page, YouTube app, YouTube Music, and YouTube Kids).”
YouTube told CNET that the outage was due to an issue with the company’s recommendation system that has since been resolved.
Downdetector reported the peak of a YouTube outage on February 17, 2026.
CNET employees who noticed the outage saw the familiar YouTube home screen with a search bar and sidebar, but no videos. YouTube apps, like on an iPad, displayed 1980s-style pixel art and the message “Something went wrong.”
(Disclaimer: Downdetector is owned by the same parent company as CNET, Ziff Davis.)
