Is YouTube Down Right Now? Outage Hits Over 800K People According to Downdetector

2 hours ago 6

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 down 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)."

CNET 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."

This is a developing story. CNET reached out to YouTube and Google for comment.

(Disclaimer: Downdetector is owned by the same parent company as CNET, Ziff Davis.)

Downdetector's map shows the YouTube outage hammering coastal cities

By David Lumb

An image of a map showing outage hotspots, with larger red circles showing a greater number of reports.

This may not be the biggest insight in the world, but Downdetector's YouTube outage map shows a serious concentration of service has been lost in big cities on the East and West coasts. Namely, people in New York City, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles and San Francisco have been hit hardest, or at least more folks there have reported losing service. Smaller concentrations of outage reports have come from Seattle, Chicago, Phoenix, what must be Denver and what I'm guessing is Greensboro, North Carolina. It's unclear why NC's third-most populated city was hit over everywhere else.

YouTube says recommendations system is cause of outage

By Jeff Carlson

On Google's YouTube support page, YouTube offered this update:

"Update: 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!"

YouTube is coming back from the brink

By Jeff Carlson

I don't mean to poke recent wounds, but it looks like this YouTube outage, although it affected more than a million people, is not going to be like the epic agony that Verizon faced in January, a cascading problem that kept millions of people disconnected for more than 10 hours.

What I'm trying to say here is that YouTube is coming back online: now seeing around 52,000 reports on Downdetector as of 6:00 p.m. PT.

YouTube reacted to the outage about an hour after it hit

By Jeff Carlson

This is standard communication during an outage, but it's still good to know that YouTube is aware of the problem and working on fixing it. The company posted this post to X about an hour into the problem:

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: https://t.co/7iTU5S9AgT

— TeamYouTube (@TeamYouTube) February 18, 2026

Blanks screens on YouTube apps across devices

By Patrick Holland

The outage seemed to hit all at once as devices couldn't load YouTube's website, while the YouTube app showed a blank screen with a "something went wrong" message.

What does the YouTube outage look like worldwide?

By Jeff Carlson

When we first spotted the YouTube outage, it looked like just under 300,000 people had reported the problem on Downdetector. Fortunately, since CNET and Downdetector share a corporate owner -- and Slack channels -- we were able to discover more details, specifically the effect it's had worldwide.

Here's how the outage looks across a handful of countries (the top 5 based on number of reports) as of about 5:45 p.m. PT:

United States – 837,973 reports
Canada – 160,259 reports
Brazil – 106,261 reports
United Kingdom – 93,284 reports
Germany – 42,994 reports

Total reports at that time were 1,688,679, with a level of peak reports of 719,234 at 01:30 UTC.

Smaller viewing experience, smaller message on iPhone

By Jeff Carlson

While the outage is ongoing, here's what comes up on my iPhone 17 Pro, though to be honest, I'm not an animal: I wouldn't normally watch YouTube videos in portrait/tall orientation.

Here's what iPad YouTube app users are seeing

By Jeff Carlson

I have to give Google credit for their error page: a no-nonsense message of "Something went wrong" and a simple grouping of geometric patterns. Unfortunately, it doesn't offer any clarity on what happened or how long the outage might last. Maybe they never expected people would see this?