YouTube suffered a widespread outage that disrupted service for millions of users around the world. During the downtime, people reported issues such as videos failing to load, error messages appearing on screens, and homepages not displaying recommended content.

 YouTube experienced a rare global outage today, leaving thousands of users worldwide unable to access the service. The disruption, which also impacted YouTube TV, was linked to a broader issue affecting Google systems.

Reports of problems began around 7:50pm ET / 12:50am GMT, when outage tracker Downdetector recorded a sharp surge in complaints — more than 280,000 reports in the United States and over 30,000 in the United Kingdom.

Google later explained that the disruption was caused by a fault in its recommendations system, which prevented videos from appearing across multiple YouTube surfaces, including the homepage, the main app, YouTube Music, and YouTube Kids.

Service has since been restored for most users, with the homepage now functioning again. You can continue following live updates for further details on what happened and how the issue was resolved.