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Videos won’t load, the homepage is blank, or the player spins forever. If you’re asking “is YouTube down,” the answer decides what you do next: wait it out, or start fixing something on your end.
Is YouTube down right now? Check it here
Run youtube.com through CheckSiteStatus. The check runs from outside your network, so the result doesn’t depend on your phone, your browser, or your Wi-Fi. If it reports YouTube as reachable and your videos still won’t play, the problem is local. If it reports YouTube as unreachable, the outage is real and nothing you change will bring it back faster.
Keep one limit in mind. A reachability check tells you whether YouTube’s servers answer. YouTube can answer fine and still have a broken feature behind the page, such as recommendations or playback. That is exactly what happened in the biggest outage of the year.
YouTube’s 2026 outages
February 17-18. The largest incident this year started around 7:50 PM ET and lasted roughly 90 minutes. Downdetector logged more than 317,000 reports in the US and 38,000 in the UK at the peak, with YouTube TV adding over 8,000 more. The website and app stayed up, but videos stopped appearing on the homepage and across YouTube Music, YouTube Kids, and YouTube TV. Google’s explanation was that “an issue with our recommendations system prevented videos from appearing across surfaces on YouTube.” Reports at the time described it as rare but not unprecedented, with a similar-scale incident in October 2025.
March. Downdetector showed spikes of thousands of reports on both March 10 and March 30.
September 6. A Sunday-morning spike passed 5,000 reports around 9:52 AM PT, mostly about video streaming. No cause was published.
Downdetector counts are people clicking “I have a problem,” not a measure of how many users were affected. They are still a good early signal, because a sharp jump usually shows up before any official statement.
What the February outage teaches
The page loaded, the logo showed up, and the site looked alive. Only the content was missing. If you only check whether youtube.com opens, you would have called it “up.” When something looks half-working, test the specific thing that’s broken: a video, the search bar, the comments, your subscriptions feed. A feature-level failure is a different problem from a full outage, and it usually clears faster.
Why YouTube stops working
Recommendation or backend failures. The feed goes empty or videos fail to load across every device at once.
Playback and streaming problems. Videos buffer or error out while the rest of the site works. This was the main complaint on September 6.
App bugs. A bad update can break the app for one phone model or OS version while YouTube’s servers are healthy.
Your own connection. Slow or unstable internet makes YouTube look broken when it isn’t.
Browser trouble. On desktop, extensions, ad blockers, and stale cache are common culprits.
Quick fixes if YouTube isn’t down for everyone
- Reload the page or force-close and reopen the app.
- Test on a different network, such as mobile data instead of Wi-Fi.
- Update the YouTube app.
- On desktop, try a private window to rule out extensions and cache.
- Try another device. If YouTube works there, the first device is the problem.
- Restart your router if every site is slow.
If YouTube loads on your phone but not your computer, the cause is almost always a browser extension, cache, or DNS setting on the computer.
Check youtube.com with an external status checker. If it shows YouTube as reachable and videos still fail, the problem is on your device or network.
Usually a connection problem, an outdated app, or a browser extension. If every device fails at once, it is more likely a YouTube-side outage.
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Most last under two hours. The February 2026 outage ran about 90 minutes.
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Test it on another device and another network. If it works elsewhere, the fault is local. Our guide on telling if a site is down for everyone or just you shows how.
That points to playback or network trouble, not a full outage. Lower the video quality, switch networks, or retry in a few minutes.
Where to confirm an outage
YouTube’s support account on X, @TeamYouTube, is where the company usually acknowledges major incidents. For wider context on how official pages work and why they lag, see our guide to status pages and what they miss. Checking another big platform at the same time helps too: if TikTok is also struggling, the problem is probably your network or a shared infrastructure provider. You can check TikTok’s status in the same way.