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YouTube Outage Disrupts Users Worldwide Tuesday

Published 18 February 2026

A widespread outage struck YouTube and its related services on Tuesday evening, disrupting access for hundreds of thousands of users across the United States and globally. The issues began around 7:45 p.m. Eastern Time, affecting core features of the video-sharing platform owned by Google.

Outage tracking site Downdetector recorded a sharp surge in complaints, peaking at over 340,000 reports worldwide, with more than 280,000 from the United States alone and around 38,000 from the United Kingdom. The problems extended to both the YouTube website and mobile applications on iOS and Android devices, as well as YouTube TV, the platform's live television streaming service. Users attempting to access the homepage, subscriptions feed, or YouTube Shorts encountered errors, including blank screens or messages stating "Something went wrong. Try again." Video playback remained possible through direct links to specific channels or videos, though many reported slower loading times and lag during streaming.

The outage also impacted YouTube Premium subscribers, who faced similar restrictions on ad-free access to content. Some users described being abruptly logged out of their accounts on mobile...

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