Reported YouTube issues drop from 30k+ to 16K

Things are looking up, my fellow YouTube lovers. Those reporting issues with the video platform on Down Detector have dropped to around 16,000 from 30,000+ just an hour ago.

While the homepage may still be slow to load, as it is for me on the U.S. West Coast, YouTube seems to be recovering nicely/quickly.

YouTube homepage still won’t load

Our colleagues in Australia have confirmed that they, too, are having issues with YouTube, primarily loading the home screen. A quick test trying to load YouTube.com from Seattle, Washington, results in similar issues. However, if I punch in a video’s direct URL, things seem to be loading with no issue.

YouTube acknowledges the outage

As the number of reported issues with YouTube continues to decline, the official YouTube account has acknowledged that you are not, in fact, imagining problems with the platform.

All’s good in Seattle, Washington and Santa Cruz, California

Dan Bracaglia here, checking in from Seattle, Washington, with no issues to report with YouTube. I’ve also received reports from friends in Santa Cruz, California, and Reading, Pennsylvania that the platform is working without issue as of 6:15 pm PST. Hopefully, this means the outage will be short-lived!

West Coast hit the hardest

Based on Downdetector’s map of reported problems, it appears that YouTube users in San Francisco have been hit the hardest, with Los Angeles not that far behind. Then, on the East Coast, New York is showing the most reported problems, though other cities across the U.S. are also experiencing issues when trying to watch videos on YouTube

No official response yet

Normally, during a major outage like this one, companies head to X (Twitter) to provide updates. However, if you go to YouTube’s official account, the last post was made 4 hours ago and is about cooking creators, not the outage. Hopefully, we learn more from YouTube and Google soon.

Things are improving…

Since we last checked in, the number of reported cases of issues with YouTube in the U.S. dropped from just over 30K to closer to 22K.

Back up on DownDetector

Although YouTube wasn’t showing up on Downdetector at first, it now is, with just over 30,000 users reporting problems on the site. Meanwhile, more than 8,000 YouTube TV users have reported experiencing issues with the service, while Google itself has close to 2,500 issues reported so far.

We’ll be tracking all three sites closely, but it seems that for now, YouTube is where the majority of problems are occurring.

Met with a blank screen

If you head over to YouTube on your computer right now, the site will load but you won’t see any videos. Instead, after doing so, I was met with a blank screen without any videos whatsoever.