Is YouTube Down Right Now? Outage Hits Over a Million People, According to Downdetector
Just as people were settling in to primetime viewing hours on the east coast in the US and the end of the workday in the west, YouTube seemed to take a nap as more than 800,000 people in the US and hundreds of thousands elsewhere in the world reported the loss of the feed, according to Downdetector. The outage started to gain traction at 5 p.m. PT and quickly spiked to 338,308 reports by 5:10 p.m., according to Datadetector’s graph.
As of 6:30 p.m. PT, the number of reports had dropped to under 50,000. Google (which owns YouTube) provided a status update naming 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).”
YouTube told CNET that the outage was due to an issue with the company’s recommendation system which has since been resolved.
Downdetector reported the peak of a YouTube outage on Feb. 17, 2026.
Screenshot by Patrick Holland/CNETCNET staffers who noticed the outage saw YouTube’s familiar home screen with a search bar and side column, but no videos. YouTube apps, such as on an iPad, showed a 1980s-style pixel artwork and the message “Something went wrong.”.
(Disclaimer: Downdetector is owned by the same parent company as CNET, Ziff Davis.)
Hot take: I wish content was the cause of the outage
By
Jeff Carlson
Now we know that the outage was caused by “an issue with [YouTube’s] recommendations system,” I must admit I’m a little let down. It makes sense, and when outages like this hit it’s almost always a technical problem: a fix that went sideways or an underlying network problem that cascades into digital calamity.
But when it started, I was hoping the problem was due to an influx of people demanding to see some specific videos. For today that could be coverage of the Winter Olympics in Italy, Stephen Colbert’s interview with Texas State Representative James Talarico that CBS forbade him to air or, heck, even the new trailer for The Mandalorian and Grogu, the first Star Wars movie in seven years. But that’s the point of a juggernaut like YouTube: Normally, it can absorb the traffic of millions of people catching up on viral videos, long-form series and even YouTube TV access without most viewers noticing a thing.
But I’ll secretly think it was speed skating gold or Pedro Pascal in a shiny suit of armor that was the real cause, which YouTube won’t publicly admit.
