Temecula, Calif. — YouTube and its suite of digital services are back online Tuesday night following a widespread global outage that the company attributed to a failure in its recommendations system.
The technical disruption, which began shortly after 5 p.m. PST, prevented hundreds of thousands of users from accessing videos on the homepage, mobile app, and associated platforms like YouTube Music, YouTube Kids, and YouTube TV.
In a statement posted to the company’s official support forum, a Google employee identified as “Hank” confirmed the resolution of the issue.
“The issue with our recommendations system has been resolved and all of our platforms (YouTube.com, the YouTube app, YouTube Music, Kids, and TV) are back to normal,” the statement read. “We really appreciate you bearing with us while we sorted this out.”
According to the update, the root cause was a malfunction in the algorithms that suggest content to viewers. This glitch “prevented videos from appearing across surfaces on YouTube,” resulting in blank screens and error messages for users worldwide.
The outage also affected YouTube TV subscribers, with the company noting earlier in the evening that a “small number of reports” indicated users were unable to log in to the live television service.
Service appears to have been fully restored as of Tuesday evening.
