Yes, you read that correct. YouTube experienced issues loading videos worldwide during the outage.
YouTube has recovered from a seemingly worldwide outage that prevented videos from loading for roughly an hour. During this outage, many users were unable to watch any videos. This was confirmed by the company at 6.23PM CST that outage is taking place.
The issue affected many services that use the YouTube infrastructure too, including YouTube TV and streaming through Google TV. Most android and iOS users confirmed they could not load or watch any content during this time. Early in the outage, the YouTube website seemed to work fine, but videos would either continuously load or we saw error screens like the one here:
All issues were resolved by 8.15 CST and YouTube cleared the outage:
Per the Verge, DownDetector showed a truly tremendous number of user reports of problems with YouTube, indicating the problem was widespread — this peaked with more than 280,000 user reports in less than an hour. Numerous users on Twitter reported that YouTube wasn’t working for them either. Global searches spiked for “is YouTube down.”
It’s most interesting when we see a tech giant like YouTube experience outages, as we cannot begin to understand their active users and how it revolves around our daily lives. Can you imagine Facebook or Instagram not working for a few hours?
