YouTube is down. Heres what we know.

Source: Mashable Tech

Timeline of Updates

• Updated on Tuesday, Feb. 17 at 9:15 p.m. ET – YouTube appeared to be working again, but Google and YouTube had not announced a cause or confirmed that the problems were fully resolved.

• Updated on Tuesday, Feb. 17 at 9:26 p.m. ET – YouTube revealed the cause of the outage: an issue with the recommendations system that prevented videos from appearing. In a statement on X, the company said:

  “The homepage is back, but we’re still working on a full fix – more coming soon!”

  (Full statement: X post)

• Updated on Tuesday, Feb. 17 at 10:19 p.m. ET – YouTube announced that the issue had been solved.

Outage Overview

The outage began around 8:00 p.m. ET on Tuesday, Feb. 17. Users reported being unable to load the YouTube homepage, search results, recommendations, and uploads.

Impact

• DownDetector recorded 837,973 user error reports in the United States alone (still rising).
• 46.7 % of U.S. respondents reported problems accessing the YouTube app.
• 21.1 % reported issues with the website.
• Similar reports came from Canada, Brazil, the United Kingdom, and Germany.

(Disclosure: Mashable and DownDetector share the same parent company.)

User Experience

Mashable editors in the U.S. and Australia saw a blank black screen when trying to load the site—only the YouTube sidebar and search bar were visible.

The YouTube homepage goes dark… – Credit: Amanda Yeo / Mashable

Official Response

YouTube acknowledged the outage on X and directed users to the Google Support page for more information:

• Initial X update: “Hi everyone, we’re aware some of you are having issues accessing YouTube right now. Our teams are aware, and we’ll provide updates as soon as we have them.”

• Follow‑up X update: “We are aware of the ongoing issue impacting YouTube homepage, recommendations, search and uploads and are working to fix it. Please follow along in our Community for updates. Our support agents do not have any additional information to share at this time.”

For real‑time details, see the Google Support thread.

Context

YouTube remains the largest streaming service in the United States by a wide margin. (Source: The Ringer)

Next Steps

At the time of writing, the exact cause of the outage was still being investigated. Mashable has reached out to Google for further comment and will update the story as new information becomes available.

This is a developing story.