Global outage hits YouTube site and YouTube Music, YouTube TV

YouTube and several of its related services experienced a widespread outage Wednesday evening, leaving users around the world unable to play videos on the main site and on YouTube Music and YouTube TV. The disruption began shortly after 7 p.m. Eastern Time and produced playback errors and blank screens for users in the United States, Europe, India, Japan, Australia and other regions.

Reports of the problem surged on outage-tracking site Downdetector within minutes of the first complaints. By about an hour after the outage began, Downdetector had logged hundreds of thousands of user reports, with some tallies in the range of roughly 320,000 to 350,000. On desktop, users commonly saw an onscreen message reading "An error occurred. Please try again later." Mobile apps displayed a "Something went wrong" notification, and some viewers reported that pages were slow to load or failed to load at all. Observers said YouTube Music and YouTube TV were affected as well, though downloaded content stored for offline viewing remained playable in some cases.

YouTube responded publicly on its TeamYouTube account on X, writing, "If you're not able to play videos on YouTube right now, we're on it!...