YouTube suffers major outage, hundreds of thousands report problems

YouTube is down today for many users worldwide, with reports pointing to a widespread outage affecting both the website and the mobile apps.

Outage tracker Downdetector showed 321,958 reports of YouTube issues in the US. The disruption also appeared to expand into related services, with 8,923 reports for YouTube TV and 2,694 reports for Google around the same time.

Based on reports across social media, users are facing different errors:

• YouTube loads, but the home feed is blank or partially broken.
• The app throws a “Something went wrong” error.
• Some embedded videos may still play, while direct viewing fails.

The YouTube team confirmed that they are aware of the ongoing issues accessing YouTube and they will provide updates as soon as they have them.

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: https://t.co/7iTU5S9AgT

 

— TeamYouTube (@TeamYouTube) February 18, 2026

We will update the post as we receive updates from YouTube.

EDIT 1: Article updates...

Update 1:

The YouTube team provided an update stating that their recommendation system caused the aforementioned problems. This particular issue prevented videos from appearing across various YouTube surfaces, including the homepage, the mobile app, YouTube Music, and YouTube Kids. While they have now deployed a fix and the YouTube homepage is back up and running for most users, the team is still working on a full resolution.

Update 2:

YouTube team also confirmed that a small number of users are unable to login to YouTube TV. They are working to fix this issue as well.

Update 3:

YouTube team has now confirmed that the issue with the recommendations system has been resolved and YouTube service on YouTube.com, the YouTube app, YouTube Music, Kids, and TV are working as expected.

Source

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Posted Wednesday 18 February 2026 at 12:35 pm AEST (my time).

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