YouTube is back up after a sudden global outage left hundreds of thousands of users scrambling Tuesday evening, with more than 400,000 people worldwide reporting issues with the popular video streaming service.
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YouTube went down worldwide Tuesday evening, with more than 400,000 users reporting issues at the peak.
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The outage was linked to problems with its AI-powered recommendation system, disrupting search, uploads, and streaming.
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Service was restored within about two hours, marking the second recommendation-related YouTube outage in recent months.
The outage, which lasted roughly two hours, began affecting users just before 8:00 p.m. Eastern Time, with YouTube posting a message about an hour later on X.
The disruption quickly sparked a surge in searches for “YouTube outage” and “Is YouTube down?” as frustrated users turned to social media and monitoring sites for answers.
“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,” it said, providing a link to its YouTube help page.
The platform said issues with its recommendations system were preventing videos from “appearing across surfaces on YouTube.”
YouTube describes the system as a personalized, AI-driven algorithm that suggests videos tailored to your specific viewing habits, history, and preferences across the homepage.
Impacted services included YouTube.com, the YouTube app, YouTube Music, YouTube Kids, and YouTube TV, the company said, including search and uploads.
Recommendation system glitch disrupts services
At its peak, 354,285 users in the United States reported problems, according to Downdetector.com, with more than half citing issues with the app and the rest split between the website and account logins.
Globally, more than 45,000 users in Brazil, over 36,000 in the United Kingdom, and another 11,000 in Australia had reported outages to the internet outage monitoring site.
Although some users are still reporting issues on the YouTube help page, the company announced it has fully resolved the issue just after 10:00 pm.
“Final Update: The issue with our recommendations system has been resolved, and all of our platforms (YouTube.com, the YouTube app, YouTube Music, Kids, and TV) are back to normal! We really appreciate you bearing with us while we sorted this out,” the Google-owned subsidiary posted on its help page and on social media.
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The platform last went down for thousands of users across the US and Europe in December, also reportedly due to issues with its recommendation system. That YouTube outage was resolved within a few hours, similar to Tuesday’s disruption.
As of January 2026, YouTube has 2.7 billion users, according to Global Media Insight.
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