Alphabet-owned YouTube has resolved a brief but widespread outage which disrupted the streaming services for thousands of users around the globe. According to Downdetector, the service outage started on Wednesday evening (October 15) and affected YouTube’s main platform as well as YouTube Music and YouTube TV. As per the outage tracking website, more than 3,66,000 users in the US reported issues accessing YouTube. Similar disruptions were logged in the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia, with users experiencing playback errors, app crashes, and login issues.

YouTube outage: Cause still unclear

YouTube acknowledged the service outage and also shared a post on social media platform X (formerly known as Twitter), ““We’ve resolved the issue impacting video playback. Thanks for your patience.” However, the company did not disclose the root cause of the outage, leaving users and analysts speculating whether it was due to a technical glitch, server overload, or a broader infrastructure hiccup.

Global impact, swift recovery

The YouTube outage started at around 7:55 PM ET and it lasted for several hours. While YouTube has faced occasional disruptions in the past, the scale of this incident—affecting multiple platforms and regions simultaneously—was notable. Downdetector’s data is based on user-submitted reports and social media activity, offering a real-time snapshot of service disruptions.