The YouTube outage left hundreds of thousands of users reporting problems accessing the service, with crowd sourced monitoring site Downdetector recording about 350,000 reports, as reported by Downdetector.
YouTube said on its help page that the issue with its recommendations system had been resolved and that YouTube.com, the YouTube app, YouTube Music, Kids, and TV were back to normal, thanking users for their patience.
The most commonly reported problem involved the YouTube app, Downdetector said, while thousands of users also said the site homepage did not load properly, a development noted by Reuters.
YouTube initially confirmed the outage in a post on X that said If you're having trouble accessing YouTube right now, you're not alone, and it later updated users that the broader issue had been fixed.
Access Problems, Login Reports And User Reactions
Before the fix was announced, YouTube acknowledged a small number of reports that some people were unable to login to YouTube TV and said that was related to the broader issue across YouTube, adding that it was also working on a fix for that service.
An Independent reporter encountered an error message on the video service homepage, though individual videos still appeared to load and play, according to the Independent's account of the incident.
Users posted about the outage on X, including Indiana based journalist Hannah Adamson who said she could access saved and recently viewed videos but that nothing on the home page loaded, and gaming creator ParrotMode joked that creators were writing long scripts about The Great YouTube Outage of 2026.
The outage prompted a wave of online commentary while YouTube moved to restore recommendations and login functions, and the company communicated the resolution on its help page and via its X account.
