YouTube, owned by Alphabet Inc., announced on Wednesday that it had resolved a global technical issue that disrupted video streaming across its main platform, YouTube Music, and YouTube TV. The outage affected several thousand users worldwide, temporarily preventing video playback and causing widespread frustration among viewers.
According to data from Downdetector, which tracks outages through user-submitted reports, the issue peaked around 7:55 p.m. ET, with more than 366,000 reports in the United States alone. Similar disruptions were also recorded in the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia.
While YouTube confirmed in a post on X (formerly Twitter) that the problem had been fixed, the company did not specify the cause of the disruption. “Users should now be able to play videos normally,” YouTube stated, thanking users for their patience during the outage.
Downdetector noted that the number of affected users may have been higher than reported, as its data relies on voluntary submissions. The outage had sparked an influx of complaints and memes across social media, with many users reporting buffering issues and error messages across devices.
YouTube, one of the world’s largest video-sharing platforms with over 2 billion monthly users, experiences occasional service interruptions, though global disruptions of this scale are relatively rare.
This latest outage serves as a reminder of the heavy reliance on online video services for entertainment, education, and communication — and the widespread impact when such platforms face technical difficulties.
