New Delhi, Feb 18: YouTube users across India and the United States faced significant disruptions on Wednesday as a major technical outage hindered access to the world’s largest video-sharing platform. Google acknowledged the service interruptions early in the day, noting that technical teams were dispatched to address reports of app crashes and video playback failures.
Data from the outage tracking platform Downdetector indicated the scale of the incident, with over 320,000 reports filed in the United States during the peak of the disruption. In India, the impact was felt widely as more than 19,000 complaints surfaced during the morning hours, suggesting the glitch affected multiple geographic regions simultaneously.
“We’re aware some of you are having issues accessing YouTube right now,” the company stated through its official TeamYouTube account. “Our teams are aware, and we’ll provide updates as soon as we have them.”
Initial findings published on the YouTube help page traced the malfunction to the internal recommendations system. This specific error prevented video content from appearing correctly across various platforms, including the primary mobile application, YouTube Music, and YouTube Kids.
While engineers managed to restore the homepage functionality relatively quickly, work continued to ensure all services returned to normal. Beyond the main site, secondary services such as YouTube TV also saw a spike in user complaints as the “something went wrong” error message became a common sight for millions.
YouTube remains a critical piece of global digital infrastructure with more than 2.5 billion monthly active users. The platform affirmed that it is committed to resolving the remaining playback issues to stabilize the user experience for its global audience.
