It’s rare to see YouTube suffer serious issues, but at the time of writing, the site appears to be down for many of its several billion users around the world. It’s only just happened, and the company says it’s now dealing with the problem.
YouTube has gone down in what is a rare outage for the Google-owned company.
The video-streaming site, which has nearly 2 billion monthly active users, began suffering issues globally at around 9 p.m. E. T. on Tuesday.
At the time of writing, the website and apps are still not working properly. On desktop, for example, the site is showing parts of the homepage together with a string of incomprehensible text and a standard message saying that its engineers are dealing with the issue.
Click through to a YouTube video from a working website and users are being met with a message that reads: “An error occurred, please try again later,” or “Sorry, that video does not exit. Sorry about that.”
About an hour after the problems began, YouTube posted a message on Twitter acknowledging the issue and apologizing to its users for the blackout: “Thanks for your reports about YouTube, YouTube TV and YouTube Music access issues. We’re working on resolving this and will let you know once fixed. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and will keep you updated.”
The problem comes just hours after Twitter started sending out nonsensical notifications to many of its users, though that’s now been sorted out. Indeed, Twitter is the very place, of course, where YouTube fans are now heading to sound off about the outage.
YouTube has suffered few outages as serious as this one in its 13-year history. We’ve reached out to YouTube and Google for a comment on what’s going on, and will let you know if they get back.
This story will be updated as it develops.
