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YouTube encountered a significant outage on Wednesday, October 15, 2025, disrupting video broadcasting for millions of users throughout the United States, Europe, Asia, and beyond.
The platform, catering to over 2.7 billion monthly users, experienced reports of playback issues and blank screens starting around 7 p.m. ET, impacting its essential service as well as YouTube Music and YouTube TV.
Google acknowledged the problem through a message on X, indicating that engineers were investigating and requesting patience from affected viewers.
At its peak, Downdetector noted over 366,000 outage reports in the U.S. by 7:55 p.m. ET, with grievances climbing to more than 600,000 worldwide within hours. Users in major cities like New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Seattle felt the brunt of the disruption, along with international hotspots in the UK (over 62,000 reports), Canada, Australia, and Japan (approximately 19,000).
Frequent errors consisted of “An error occurred, please try again later” messages on desktops and “Something went wrong” on mobile applications, hindering video loading, playlist access, and even logins.
About 54% of challenges centered on video and music streaming, leaving offline downloads as the sole alternative for some.
The outage’s timing intensified frustration, coinciding with evening prime time when users typically relax with content. Social media exploded with memes and complaints, such as one user joking, “For the first time ever, YouTube actually went down.
Update 1:
By late Wednesday night, YouTube declared that the issue had been resolved, posting on X that users could now stream videos normally across all impacted services.
Downdetector reports declined swiftly, though isolated slow-loading issues persisted into Thursday morning, October 16.
The company’s status page confirmed teams were supervising for full recovery, expressing gratitude for user patience during the roughly two-hour interruption.
For now, users are encouraged to check the official X account (@TeamYouTube) or Downdetector for updates, ensuring seamless access to the world’s premier video-sharing platform.
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