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YouTube Goes Dark: Global Outage Frustrates Millions
18 Feb
Summary
- YouTube experienced a major outage impacting users globally.
- The outage began around 8 PM Eastern time and lasted for hours.
- YouTube officially confirmed the issue was resolved by 10:12 PM ET.
On the evening of February 17, 2026, YouTube suffered a significant global outage that left millions of users unable to access the platform. The disruption began around 8 PM Eastern time, with reports flooding in from various countries including the United States, Canada, India, the Philippines, Australia, and Russia.
During the peak of the outage, over 338,000 users reported issues on Downdetector. Many users experienced problems with the YouTube app, while others found the website inaccessible. Reports indicated that some Google services were also affected around the same time.
Service restoration was gradual. While some users began regaining partial access, with homepages loading but recommended videos failing to appear, others still faced complete inaccessibility. Team YouTube acknowledged the problem before 9 PM and later updated that their recommendation system had issues, though the homepage was back for some. The outage was officially declared completely fixed by 10:12 PM Eastern time.
