YouTube has recovered from a seemingly worldwide outage that prevented videos from loading for roughly an hour.
The issue appeared to affect other services that use the YouTube infrastructure too, including YouTube TV and the movies and TV shows you’d purchase through Google TV (formerly known as Google Play Movies & TV). We couldn’t load them.
Early in the outage, the YouTube website itself seemed to load just fine, but videos themselves would continuously show the loading wheel.
Things seemed to be back as early as 8:30PM ET, but you might have hit a few quirks. At that point, videos played on YouTube’s website seemed to be working as they normally do.
DownDetector showed a truly tremendous number of user reports of problems with YouTube, indicating the problem was widespread — the DownDetector graph peaked with more than 280,000 user reports in less than an hour. Numerous users on Twitter reported that YouTube wasn’t working for them, either, and searches spiked for “is YouTube down.”
The platform’s TeamYouTube account acknowledged the problems in a Twitter post. “If you’re having trouble watching videos on YouTube right now, you’re not alone — our team is aware of the issue and working on a fix. We’ll follow up here with any updates,” it tweeted at 7:23 p.m. ET.
Nearly two hours later, Team YouTube said service had been restored: “And we’re back — we’re so sorry for the interruption. This is fixed across all devices & YouTube services, thanks for being patient with us,” the account tweeted, adding a red heart emoji.
