YouTube was down on Tuesday, February 17, in a massive outage that left hundreds of thousands of users unable to load the homepage, recommendations feed, Shorts, or suggested videos. The disruption began around 4:45PM PT (7:45PM ET) and peaked within minutes, with more than 338,000 outage reports logged on Downdetector by 5:10 PM PT. Complaints continued to climb globally, affecting users in the US, India, the UK, Argentina, and elsewhere, before eventually being resolved.
The official account on X acknowledged the issue shortly after 5PM PT: âIf youâre having trouble accessing YouTube right now, youâre not alone â our teams are looking into this and will follow up here with updates.â About 25 minutes later, the account provided a clearer explanation: âAn issue with our recommendations system prevented videos from appearing across surfaces on YouTube (including the homepage, the YouTube app, YouTube Music and YouTube Kids). The homepage is back, but weâre still working on a full fix â more coming soon!â
By 6:05PM PT the homepage had largely returned for most users, though the recommendations bar within video players and the Shorts feed remained blank or slow for many. Direct links to specific videos and channels continued to load, as did embeds on external sites. Ads appeared to play normally when videos were accessed through subscriptions or direct URLs. YouTube Music and YouTube TV saw scattered reports of issues but were generally less affected than the main platform. The outage was global in scope, with major spikes in India (over 19,000 reports in the early morning IST hours) and the US (more than 320,000 at peak). Users on both mobile apps (iOS and Android) and desktop browsers reported identical symptoms: blank feeds, error messages such as âSomething went wrong. Try again,â and in some cases being unexpectedly signed out of the mobile app. Google provided no additional public comment beyond the TeamYouTube updates.
At approximately 7:40PM PT, TeamYouTube posted: âThe issue with our recommendations system has been resolved and all of our platforms (YouTube.com, the YouTube app, YouTube Music, Kids, and TV) are back to normal! We really appreciate you bearing with us while we sorted this out.â The rapid resolutionâroughly two hours from the initial spike to full restorationâsuggests the problem was confined to the recommendation engine rather than a core content-delivery failure. That engine powers the homepage feed, suggested videos sidebar, Shorts recommendations, and personalized suggestions across YouTube Music and YouTube Kids.
YouTube serves more than 2.7 billion monthly active users and remains Googleâs second-largest advertising engine after Search. The platform generates tens of billions in annual revenue, with YouTube advertising alone exceeding $60 billion across ads and subscriptions in 2025. Even brief outages can disrupt viewing habits, creator earnings (through reduced watch time), and advertiser impressions, though Tuesdayâs incident was relatively short-lived. This comes at a time when the recommendations system has grown sophisticated in recent years, incorporating AI-driven personalization, Shorts discovery, and cross-surface suggestions.
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