YouTube outage cause revealed: What we know
YouTube suffered a global outage on Tuesday, with thousands of people reporting issues with the platform from around 8:00 p.m. ET / 5:00 p.m. PT. Now we know what caused it.
In a statement shared to the official TeamYouTube X account, the company revealed that the outage was due to a problem with the recommendations system. This algorithmic system is responsible for offering you videos it thinks you'll want to watch based on your past viewing habits.
In some ways, maybe this outage is a sign that we should all go outside and touch some grass.
"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)," YouTube wrote approximately an hour and a half after the outage began. "The homepage is back, but we're still working on a full fix — more coming soon!"
It provided a further update within the hour: "We're also seeing a small number of reports that some people are unable to login to YouTube TV. This is related to the broader issue across YouTube, and we're also working on a fix here."
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Crowdsourced outage tracker Downdetector received a spike in reports about YouTube on Tuesday evening, with over 1.6 million pouring in over the last 24 hours. (Disclosure: Mashable and Downdetector share the same parent company.) Approximately half of these reports came from the U.S., with users encountering issues with the video sharing platform's app and the website, though people across the globe were impacted.
Mashable was unable to use YouTube in Australia, with attempts to access the website a resulting in a blank black screen adorned only with YouTube's side bar and search bar.