YouTube announced on Tuesday that it had fixed a technical issue that temporarily disrupted access to its services worldwide, following reports of widespread outages flagged by outage-monitoring site Downdetector.
The company said the disruption stemmed from a malfunction in its recommendation system, which prevented videos from appearing properly across various YouTube 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,” the company said in a statement.
At the height of the disruption, more than 320,000 users in the United States reported problems, according to Downdetector. The platform’s figures are based on user-submitted complaints, meaning the actual number of affected users may have differed.
Reports of outages also surfaced in several other countries, including India, the United Kingdom, Australia and Mexico.
According to market research firm Statista, YouTube had surpassed 2.5 billion global viewers by early 2025, while its music and premium subscription services crossed the 100 million mark.
Parent company Google has previously reported that users watch more than a billion hours of YouTube content daily on television screens alone. The platform also sees over 500 hours of video uploaded every minute.
Industry analysts have long described Google’s 2006 acquisition of YouTube for $1.65 billion in stock as a transformative deal, merging Google’s advertising and search dominance with one of the world’s most popular video-sharing platforms.