YouTube Recommendation System Failure Blacks Out Homepage for 320,000 Users Worldwide

On Tuesday evening, the blank white screens began appearing across devices worldwide. Where YouTube's familiar grid of recommended videos normally beckoned users to spend another few minutes scrolling, there was nothing — just an empty homepage staring back at more than 320,000 people who had come to rely on the platform as the world's dominant video destination YouTube Outage Affects Homepage, App, YouTube TV & More; Issue Resolved After Fix To “Recommendation System”deadline.com·SecondaryYouTube is addressing the issue that took the service down for some users for a couple of hours. Many users took to social media to complain that YouTube was not loading certain videos. The digital media platform was inundated with reports that some users were not able to stream videos on the site. “If you’re having trouble accessing YouTube right now, you’re not alone — our teams are looking into this,” TeamYouTube posted on X, the microblogging platform formerly known as Twitter..

The outage, which struck at approximately 5:00 p.m. Pacific Time on February 17, did not merely inconvenience casual viewers. It exposed the degree to which a single algorithmic system — YouTube's recommendation engine — has become the invisible backbone of the entire platform. When that engine failed, it did not just stop suggesting videos. It effectively rendered YouTube's homepage, mobile app, YouTube Music, YouTube Kids, and YouTube TV unable to surface content at all YouTube Outage Affects Homepage, App, YouTube TV & More; Issue Resolved After Fix To “Recommendation System”deadline.com·SecondaryYouTube is addressing the issue that took the service down for some users for a couple of hours. Many users took to social media to complain that YouTube was not loading certain videos. The digital media platform was inundated with reports that some users were not able to stream videos on the site. “If you’re having trouble accessing YouTube right now, you’re not alone — our teams are looking into this,” TeamYouTube posted on X, the microblogging platform formerly known as Twitter..

"If you're having trouble accessing YouTube right now, you're not alone — our teams are looking into this," the company's official TeamYouTube account posted on X shortly after the disruption began YouTube Outage Affects Homepage, App, YouTube TV & More; Issue Resolved After Fix To “Recommendation System”deadline.com·SecondaryYouTube is addressing the issue that took the service down for some users for a couple of hours. Many users took to social media to complain that YouTube was not loading certain videos. The digital media platform was inundated with reports that some users were not able to stream videos on the site. “If you’re having trouble accessing YouTube right now, you’re not alone — our teams are looking into this,” TeamYouTube posted on X, the microblogging platform formerly known as Twitter.. That initial acknowledgment was followed roughly twenty-five minutes later by a more specific diagnosis: "An issue with our recommendations system prevented videos from appearing across surfaces on YouTube" YouTube Goes Down: Platform Experiences Technical Issue with Recommendation Systemvariety.com·SecondaryYouTube went down on Tuesday night, with more than 300,000 users experiencing technical difficulties, according to DownDetector. Problems for the digital video platform began around 5 p.m. PT, and some users saw services partially restored as early as about 6:00 p.m. PT..

The distinction matters. YouTube was not, technically, down. Its servers remained operational. Users who navigated directly to specific channels or accessed videos through their subscription feeds could still watch content normally YouTube Goes Down: Platform Experiences Technical Issue with Recommendation Systemvariety.com·SecondaryYouTube went down on Tuesday night, with more than 300,000 users experiencing technical difficulties, according to DownDetector. Problems for the digital video platform began around 5 p.m. PT, and some users saw services partially restored as early as about 6:00 p.m. PT.. Advertisements, notably, continued to play without interruption YouTube Goes Down: Platform Experiences Technical Issue with Recommendation Systemvariety.com·SecondaryYouTube went down on Tuesday night, with more than 300,000 users experiencing technical difficulties, according to DownDetector. Problems for the digital video platform began around 5 p.m. PT, and some users saw services partially restored as early as about 6:00 p.m. PT.. What collapsed was the discovery layer — the algorithmic machinery that decides what the platform's estimated 2.7 billion monthly active users see when they open YouTube.

For critics of Big Tech's recommendation-driven architecture, the outage offered an inadvertent illustration of a longstanding concern: that platforms like YouTube have become so dependent on algorithmic curation that they cannot function without it. The homepage is not merely a convenience feature — it is, for most users, YouTube itself. Without recommendations, the platform reverts to something closer to a search engine, requiring users to already know what they want to watch.

Downdetector, the crowd-sourced outage tracker, registered a peak of over 320,000 user reports in the United States alone at approximately 8:00 p.m. Eastern Time YouTube Outage Affects Homepage, App, YouTube TV & More; Issue Resolved After Fix To “Recommendation System”deadline.com·SecondaryYouTube is addressing the issue that took the service down for some users for a couple of hours. Many users took to social media to complain that YouTube was not loading certain videos. The digital media platform was inundated with reports that some users were not able to stream videos on the site. “If you’re having trouble accessing YouTube right now, you’re not alone — our teams are looking into this,” TeamYouTube posted on X, the microblogging platform formerly known as Twitter.. Reports poured in from across the globe, with users in India, the United Kingdom, Australia, Argentina, and Mexico all confirming service interruptions YouTube Outage Affects Homepage, App, YouTube TV & More; Issue Resolved After Fix To “Recommendation System”deadline.com·SecondaryYouTube is addressing the issue that took the service down for some users for a couple of hours. Many users took to social media to complain that YouTube was not loading certain videos. The digital media platform was inundated with reports that some users were not able to stream videos on the site. “If you’re having trouble accessing YouTube right now, you’re not alone — our teams are looking into this,” TeamYouTube posted on X, the microblogging platform formerly known as Twitter.. The global footprint of the disruption underscored how deeply YouTube's infrastructure is woven into daily media consumption patterns across every continent.

The incident was resolved within roughly two hours. By 6:00 p.m. Pacific Time, YouTube's homepage had largely been restored, and by 9:26 p.m. Eastern Time the company declared the recommendation system fully operational across all platforms . "The issue with our recommendations system has been resolved, and all of our platforms (YouTube.com, the YouTube app, YouTube Music, Kids, and TV) are back to normal," YouTube stated YouTube Outage Affects Homepage, App, YouTube TV & More; Issue Resolved After Fix To “Recommendation System”deadline.com·SecondaryYouTube is addressing the issue that took the service down for some users for a couple of hours. Many users took to social media to complain that YouTube was not loading certain videos. The digital media platform was inundated with reports that some users were not able to stream videos on the site. “If you’re having trouble accessing YouTube right now, you’re not alone — our teams are looking into this,” TeamYouTube posted on X, the microblogging platform formerly known as Twitter..

Google, YouTube's parent company, declined to provide further technical details about what caused the recommendation system to fail YouTube Outage Affects Homepage, App, YouTube TV & More; Issue Resolved After Fix To “Recommendation System”deadline.com·SecondaryYouTube is addressing the issue that took the service down for some users for a couple of hours. Many users took to social media to complain that YouTube was not loading certain videos. The digital media platform was inundated with reports that some users were not able to stream videos on the site. “If you’re having trouble accessing YouTube right now, you’re not alone — our teams are looking into this,” TeamYouTube posted on X, the microblogging platform formerly known as Twitter.. That reticence is not unusual — major technology companies rarely disclose the root causes of outages in real time — but it leaves open questions about the resilience of a system that processes billions of viewing signals daily.

This was not YouTube's first significant service disruption in recent months. On December 19, 2025, network monitoring firm ThousandEyes documented a broader Google and YouTube disruption lasting approximately 90 minutes, during which services intermittently returned errors or timed out across all regions. That incident appeared to involve service-level failures rather than connectivity issues reaching Google's web servers.

The recurring nature of these disruptions has drawn attention from industry analysts who question whether the increasing complexity of recommendation algorithms — which must process real-time user behavior, content metadata, advertiser requirements, and regulatory compliance signals simultaneously — is creating new categories of systemic risk. YouTube's recommendation engine is widely regarded as one of the most sophisticated machine learning systems in commercial deployment, drawing on deep neural networks that were first described in a landmark 2016 Google research paper and have been continuously refined since.

Skeptics of the platform economy have long argued that the concentration of video distribution in a single platform creates fragility that would be unacceptable in other critical infrastructure sectors. When an electric utility experiences an outage, regulators demand root cause analyses and public accountability. When YouTube goes dark for 320,000 users — affecting everything from individual creators' livelihoods to live television subscribers — the company issues a cheerful post on X and moves on.

From the perspective of the platform's vast creator community, even a two-hour outage carries real economic consequences. YouTube creators depend on algorithmic recommendations for the vast majority of their viewership; homepage and suggested video placements drive far more traffic than direct searches or subscriber notifications. An outage during prime evening viewing hours in the United States — precisely when the disruption occurred — means lost views, lost advertising revenue, and disrupted premiere schedules for creators who had planned content drops around peak traffic windows.

YouTube TV subscribers faced an additional layer of frustration. A subset of users reported being unable to log into the live television service entirely, a problem YouTube confirmed was "related to the broader issue across YouTube" YouTube Outage Affects Homepage, App, YouTube TV & More; Issue Resolved After Fix To “Recommendation System”deadline.com·SecondaryYouTube is addressing the issue that took the service down for some users for a couple of hours. Many users took to social media to complain that YouTube was not loading certain videos. The digital media platform was inundated with reports that some users were not able to stream videos on the site. “If you’re having trouble accessing YouTube right now, you’re not alone — our teams are looking into this,” TeamYouTube posted on X, the microblogging platform formerly known as Twitter.. For households that have replaced traditional cable with YouTube TV, a login failure during evening programming hours is functionally equivalent to losing their television service.

The broader technology industry will likely view Tuesday's outage as another data point in an ongoing debate about algorithmic dependency. As recommendation systems grow more powerful and more central to how users interact with digital platforms, the consequences of their failure grow correspondingly more severe. A platform that cannot show you its front page because the algorithm is down has, in a meaningful sense, ceased to exist for most practical purposes.

YouTube's swift resolution of the issue — roughly two hours from first reports to full restoration — is, by the standards of major platform outages, relatively impressive. But the question that lingers is not whether YouTube can fix its recommendation engine quickly. It is whether a platform serving billions of users should be architected such that a single system failure can render the entire user experience effectively nonfunctional. That is a design question, not an operations question, and it is one that Tuesday's outage placed in sharp relief.