YouTube Goes Down: Platform Experiences Technical Issue with Recommendation System

YouTube went down on Tuesday night, with more than 300,000 users experiencing technical difficulties, according to DownDetector. Problems for the digital video platform began around 5 p.m. PT, and some users saw services partially restored as early as about 6:00 p.m. PT.

“If you’re having trouble accessing YouTube right now, you’re not alone — our teams are looking into this and will follow up here with updates,” read a post from the TeamYouTube X account, which linked to the website’s support page.

Approximately 25 minutes later, TeamYouTube posted the following update on X: “An 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 we’re still working on a full fix – more coming soon!”

User complaints on DownDetector spiked at 5:21 p.m. PT and heavily tapered off by 6:06 p.m. PT.

During the outage, users could still access videos through their subscriptions. However, the homepage and the suggestion bar in the video player were completely blank. The suggestion bar still seems to be down, but access to the homepage has been restored.

The problem occurred on both the mobile app and the desktop version of YouTube. Ads seemed unaffected by the outage when playing videos through subscription pages.

In online chatter about the outage, users from the United States, India, the U.K. and Argentina posted about service interruptions, suggesting the technical disruption was a global issue.

Google had no further comment regarding the issue.