Thousands of users in the United States were unable to access YouTube services on Wednesday afternoon, as reports of a massive outage flooded social media platforms. According to DownDetector, a website that tracks real-time online service disruptions, over 203,000 users reported issues with YouTube, marking one of the platform’s largest outages in recent months.
The outage didn’t just affect the main YouTube platform. Users also experienced disruptions with YouTube Music and YouTube TV. As per DownDetector data, more than 4,800 reports were logged for YouTube Music, while over 2,300 users faced problems with YouTube TV.
Roughly 54% of the complaints were related to video and music streaming failures, indicating widespread playback errors across the platforms.
At the time of writing, YouTube has not issued an official statement regarding the cause of the outage. However, Team YouTube’s support account on X (formerly Twitter) has been actively responding to frustrated users, acknowledging the issue but stopping short of providing an explanation.
Outage Hits Major U.S. Cities
According to DownDetector’s YouTube Outage Map, the disruption affected users across multiple U.S. regions, including Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Chicago, New York, Washington D.C., and Detroit. The outage appears to have spread rapidly across the country, impacting both desktop and mobile users.
Meanwhile, speculations have surfaced online, with some users suggesting a possible DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack as the cause behind the widespread failure. However, there has been no confirmation from YouTube or Google regarding these claims.
YouTube services appear to be gradually recovering for some users, but the company has yet to provide clarity on the root cause of the outage.