Today, April 11, has been a day for outages. Right after Apple Music and other Apple services went down, YouTube also began experiencing an outage. Thousands of users have reported facing challenges in running basic functions on the website, including playing a video and loading pages after searching for a particular keyword. The issue appears to be global and not restricted to a particular region. At the moment, the reason behind the outage is not known.

Widespread impact and frustration

According to online outage monitoring platform DownDetector, user reports of problems with YouTube began at around 9:17 PM EDT. The initial reports started coming in at around 5:30 AM IST, with the issue peaking at around 7:27 AM when more than 1,200 users reported an issue. The problems ranged from not being able to access the website and playing videos, to opening the app.

As per reports, 65 percent of complaints on DownDetector were around not being able to stream videos, while 25 percent were around not being able to access the app. Another 10 percent struggled to access the website.

With around 2 billion active users, YouTube is among the highest traffic platforms globally. The outage left many users frustrated, prompting them to take to Twitter to share their experiences. One user posted, “Is anyone else’s YouTube just not loading, loading then not loading #YouTubeDOWN? or is this just me #youtube.” Another joked, “YouTube down. I feel bad for all the people eating dinner who got no YouTube.”

Upon escalation, the official YouTube support account, TeamYouTube, replied to a user, saying, “tysm for letting us know! we’re looking into this rn” (Thank you so much for letting us know. We are looking into this right now).

As per the latest update, the issue appears to be resolving, with some users finally able to access the platform.