YouTube has recovered from a seemingly worldwide outage that prevented videos from loading for roughly an hour. During the outage, many Verge staffers were unable to watch videos, and YouTube confirmed at 7:23PM ET that something was going on:
The issue appeared to affect other services that use the YouTube infrastructure too, including YouTube TV and the movies and TV shows you’d purchase through Google TV (formerly known as Google Play Movies & TV). We couldn’t load them.
Early in the outage, the YouTube website itself seemed to load just fine, but videos themselves would continuously show the loading wheel. One Verge staffer got a video to load after about a minute. As of about 8:00PM ET, though, we saw error screens like this whenever we tried to watch a video:
At 9:13 PM ET, YouTube gave the all-clear:
Things seemed to be back as early as 8:30PM ET, but you might have hit a few quirks. At that point, videos played on YouTube’s website seemed to be working as they normally do. On the mobile app, one Verge staffer saw a few error messages, but those would clear with a refresh. YouTube TV worked on mobile for another Verge staffer at that point after he force closed the app.
DownDetector showed a truly tremendous number of user reports of problems with YouTube, indicating the problem was widespread — the DownDetector graph peaked with more than 280,000 user reports in less than an hour. Numerous users on Twitter reported that YouTube wasn’t working for them, either, and searches spiked for “is YouTube down.”
When reached for comment, YouTube pointed us to the tweet we included in this story.
Update November 11th, 8:51PM ET: YouTube seems to be recovering, so we have made numerous changes throughout.
Update, 9:16PM ET: Added YouTube’s all-clear.
Comments
Well then, I’m just going to go poke my head out the door and see if the world has ended.
By mr_k on 11.11.20 7:47pm
Not yet, but we still have a few months. Patience.
By McJabberclackers on 11.11.20 8:03pm
Even Youtube is not safe from 2020.
By CrazyDroid on 11.11.20 7:48pm
Oh God….
… And we still have the Earthquake and meteor to deal with, too
By TheTruthØE on 11.12.20 12:06am
Two birds one stone when you have YouTubeTV.
By Michael Konen on 11.11.20 7:56pm
It’s the globalist conspiracy from the Silicon Valley!
/sarcasm tag mandatory
Just kidding what really sucks is loss of Google photos unlimited photo storage. Sadly gonna have to migrate to Amazon prime photo storage
By ksyndicate on 11.11.20 8:06pm
i could use the break tbh.
By fritzo on 11.11.20 8:17pm
It is down in Brazil as well
By HenriqueOz on 11.11.20 8:18pm
"YouTube didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment."
Well of course YouTube didn’t reply. IT’S DOWN.
By brianashe on 11.11.20 8:18pm
Who else rebooted their equipment?
By minimalism on 11.11.20 8:19pm
Another casualty of Windows automatic updates.
By jtfields on 11.11.20 8:20pm
And here I thought YouTube got smart and detected my ad blocker (1blocker) and locked me out from playing videos.
By zedx79 on 11.11.20 8:22pm
Honestly, I’d pay money to be in these YouTube outage calls right now. Can you imagine? Some of the world’s smartest engineers in zoom calls spanning the globe trying to pinpoint what domino caused the whole thing to collapse and get it back on track. Pretty neat stuff if you’re a nerd!
By jake-the-bear on 11.11.20 8:28pm
Any platform spammed with ads is sure to crash.
By Andrewhahalee on 11.11.20 8:28pm
See you all on Quibi!
By pentachrism on 11.11.20 8:31pm
That’s an alternate reality world we all live in.
By ksyndicate on 11.11.20 11:10pm
Anyone want to place bets on the root cause? I’m going to say some SRE rolled out a bad config update.
By paxys on 11.11.20 8:42pm
ITs been 40 mins but it’s up in Australia at least
By K-C-B on 11.11.20 8:49pm
Apple TV+ is still working flawlessly. Apple>Google/Samsung as usual
By JoeC651 on 11.11.20 9:01pm
How are you going to compare two different services with two different ideas…
By rdawo on 11.11.20 9:39pm
YouTube was down for an unacceptable amount of time. I already contacted Google demanding one year free Youtube red as compensation.
By MaxCaud on 11.11.20 11:43pm
i thought it was just me, i didn’t think the whole of youtube could go down
By Liamicely on 11.11.20 9:25pm
Yeah I assumed it was my connection
By tb4000 on 11.11.20 9:45pm
video i was watching was hours long, so when i noticed i figured i would keep watching what i was watching… Baby Shark Doo Doo, Doo Doo, Doo, Doo
By NeatOman on 11.12.20 1:44am
Really highlights that there’s not really a viable alternative to YouTube
By CL114C0777498D on 11.12.20 7:35am