YouTube users reported a severe outage with the video-streaming giant on Tuesday, February 17, at around 8: 00 p. m. ET, affecting thousands of viewers.
The issues affected the homepage and recommendation features, as they became blur and users saw missing recommendations across the web and app interfaces.
What happened to YouTube?
According to DownDetector, a web-outage tracking site, nearly 838, 000 users reported complaints across the US.
After a few hours of severe disruption, the Alphabet-owned YouTube identified the root cause as a problem with its recommendations system that prevented videos from appearing across service surfaces.
Currently, YouTube has been restored and continues to work normally, as the company declared the incident resolved at 10: 19 p. m. ET.
YouTube not working? Follow these steps:
If you are still unable to access the YouTube properly, then follow these steps:
If you are using the app on PC, then refresh it with Control + F5 on Windows, or Command + Shift + R on a Mac.
On the app, swipe it away from your current apps completely and reopen it fresh.
If it still remains inaccessible, simply clear your cache.
This disruption highlights the reliance of central recommendation engines and discovery features to modern streaming services; when they go down, it causes widespread disruption even if the underlying playback infrastructure remains intact.
