The world’s largest online video sharing platform, YouTube, was restored soon after an unusual worldwide outage which started on Wednesday around 6:53 PM ET (Thursday, 5:23 AM IST).
The problem appears to have mainly affected the loading of videos. Users have reported not being able to watch videos because they failed to load on the website. The video loading issue also affected other YouTube services such as YouTube TV and the shows and movies purchased on Google Play store.
YouTube acknowledged this issue in a tweet made from the “TeamYouTube” twitter handle at 7:23 PM ET (5:53 AM IST). The tweet read:
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.
— TeamYouTube (@TeamYouTube) November 12, 2020
DownDetector.com, a website which monitors website outages and other issues, showed somewhere about 280,000 reports at its peak around 7:49 PM ET (6:19 AM IST). There was also an increase in Google search queries about the outage around the same time.
At 9:13 PM ET (7:43 AM IST), the platform announced in another tweet from the same TeamYouTube twitter handler that the issue has been fixed across all devices and YouTube services and that the service is now back up and running.
…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 ❤️ https://t.co/1s0qbxQqc6
— TeamYouTube (@TeamYouTube) November 12, 2020