YouTube restores service after global outage affecting millions

YouTube experienced a global outage impacting its homepage, recommendations, and apps including YouTube Music and Kids. Downdetector recorded over 3.2 lakh complaints in the U.S. and nearly 20,000 in India.

Mumbai: Google-owned video platform YouTube said on Wednesday it restored large parts of its service after a global outage that left thousands of users reporting issues with the social media platform.

“We’re back!! This issue has been fixed across YouTube. Thanks for all the reports and for bearing with us while we sorted it out,” TeamYouTube posted on X social media platform.

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The company said the homepage was restored, and the team was working on a full fix.

“Update: An issue with our recommendations system prevented videos from appearing across surfaces on YouTube (including the homepage, the YouTube app, YouTube Music and YouTube Kids). The homepage is back, but we’re still working on a full fix – more coming soon!,” the post said.

Outage‑tracking site Downdetector showed 321,958 user complaints across multiple countries. In India, the outage was first reported around 6 am with nearly 20,000 complaints, with over 70 per cent of them from app users, the site showed.

In the United States, over 3.2 lakh users flagged outages. YouTube TV logged 8,923 complaints, while Google recorded 2,694 reports of issues.

YouTube’s parent company Alphabet earlier this week reported annual revenues exceeded $400 billion for the first time, with the Gemini AI app reaching over 750 million monthly active users.

In the company’s quarterly earnings call, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said they have sold more than 8 million paid seats of Gemini Enterprise launched just four months ago.

In addition, “We are also seeing significantly higher engagement per user especially since the launch of Gemini 3 in December. Overall, we are seeing our AI investments and infrastructure drive revenue and growth across the board to meet customer demand and cap on the growing opportunities ahead of us, our 2026 capex investments are anticipated to be in the range of $175 to $185 billion,” he explained.