Millions of people tried to open YouTube on February 17th and got nothing. No videos, no homepage, no recommendations — just a broken service at one of the internet’s busiest platforms.

The outage hit at around 8 PM Eastern time and spread fast. Within hours, it wasn’t just a US problem.

The Outage Spread Way Beyond America

Reports started flooding in from Canada, India, the Philippines, Australia, and Russia almost immediately. So this wasn’t a regional hiccup — it was a genuinely widespread platform failure.

YouTube outage spread across multiple continents logging 338,000 Downdetector reports

Downdetector, the site that tracks service disruptions, logged a staggering 338,000 reports before numbers started falling. That’s a massive spike, even by YouTube’s scale. Users also flooded Reddit to confirm they couldn’t access the service, with complaints rolling in well past 9 PM Eastern.

Interestingly, Google itself also started showing problems around the same time. Thousands of separate Downdetector reports pointed to broader Google service issues starting at around 8 PM too.

Not Everything Broke the Same Way

Here’s where it gets a little weird. The outage didn’t hit everyone equally or all at once.

Some users lost access to the homepage completely. Others could load the homepage but saw zero recommended videos — basically a shell of a site with nothing to watch. Engadget’s own Managing Editor Cherlynn Low reported that both YouTube and Google Home Assistant stayed down for her past 9:53 PM Eastern.

YouTube outage spread across Canada, India, Australia, Russia simultaneously

So even as some users started getting partial access back, plenty of others were still locked out entirely. That kind of uneven restoration is pretty common with large-scale outages, but it makes the experience frustrating and confusing in real time.

YouTube’s Recommendation System Was the Culprit

Team YouTube posted on X before 9 PM to acknowledge the problem. About 20 minutes later, a follow-up update pointed the finger at the recommendation system specifically.

That explains the split experience perfectly. The homepage infrastructure came back up relatively quickly, but the system that actually populates your feed with videos was still broken. So you could technically reach the site — you just had nothing to watch when you got there.

YouTube recommendation engine failure left homepage empty, affecting Google Assistant

YouTube didn’t explain what caused the recommendation engine to fail in the first place. But by 10:12 PM Eastern, the team posted that everything was completely fixed and back to normal.

A Two-Hour Reminder of How Much We Rely on YouTube

What’s striking about this outage isn’t just the scale — it’s how quickly people noticed and how much it mattered. YouTube isn’t just a video site anymore. It’s where people watch the news, follow live events, listen to music, and run businesses through their channels.

Two hours of downtime affecting hundreds of thousands of users across multiple continents shows just how load-bearing this single platform has become. And the fact that Google Home Assistant also went dark for some users during the same window suggests these services are more tightly connected under the hood than most people realize.

If you were caught in the middle of this one, you’re definitely not alone. The good news is everything appears fully restored now — recommendations included.