YouTube restores services after global outage disrupts millions

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New Delhi: YouTube, an Alphabet-owned company, has solved a mass outage that interrupted users in various countries streaming on Wednesday evening (October 15). This interference impacted the primary sites of YouTube, YouTube Music, and YouTube TV, and many individuals could not watch videos or manage their accounts. Downdetector showed that over 366,000 users in the United States were complaining, with the same being reported in the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia.

The service interruption started at approximately 7:55 PM ET and took several hours, after which the service came back to the platform. During the downtime, users complained of playback issues, crashing of the apps, and issues with logging in. Even though YouTube was quick to respond by confirming that the problem was solved, the company failed to specify the nature of the disruption.

 

YouTube acknowledges and resolves issue

YouTube said in a post on X, “We fixed the problem that affected the playback of videos. Thanks for your patience.” The site assured that its YouTube Music and YouTube TV services were all running as expected.

Global impact and user reactions

YouTube has suffered minor interruptions in the past; this outage was huge, as it affected various services at the same time. The global character of the problem was reflected in the data of Downdetector, which was supported by the reports of users and their activity on social networks. Analysts speculated that a technical defect or a one-time server overload might have been the cause; however, YouTube has not yet identified it.

This was broadly affecting people; YouTube was quick to restore its services in all the affected areas. Towards the end of the evening, the users stated that video playback and the work of the apps returned to normal. The company also appreciates the patience of the users and promised to keep on monitoring them to avoid such occurrences in the future.