On October 15, 2025, YouTube, the world’s leading video-sharing platform, experienced a significant global outage that disrupted services for millions of users across various continents, including North America, Europe, and Asia. The disruption affected YouTube’s core platform, as well as its subsidiary services, YouTube Music and YouTube TV.
The outage began around 7 p.m. Eastern Time, with users reporting issues such as playback errors, blank screens, and difficulties accessing the platform. According to Downdetector, a website that monitors online service disruptions, over 366,000 reports were logged in the United States alone by 7:55 p.m. ET. Globally, the number of reports surged to over 600,000 within hours. Major urban centers like New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Seattle were notably impacted, alongside international cities in the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and Japan.
Users encountered error messages such as An error occurred, please try again later on desktop browsers and Something went wrong on mobile applications. These issues prevented video playback, access to playlists, and even user logins. Approximately 54% of the reported problems were related to video and music streaming, leaving offline downloads as the only viable option for some users.
The timing of the outage coincided with prime evening hours, a peak period for user engagement, leading to heightened frustration among the platform’s vast user base. Social media platforms were quickly flooded with memes and complaints, highlighting the widespread impact of the service disruption.
YouTube’s support team promptly acknowledged the issue on X (formerly Twitter), stating, If you’re not able to play videos on YouTube right now – we’re on it! Thanks for your patience. The company assured users that their engineering teams were actively investigating the problem to restore normal service.
By late Wednesday evening, YouTube announced that the issue had been resolved. In a follow-up post on X, they confirmed, This has been fixed! You can check more here. Downdetector reports showed a sharp decline in user complaints following this announcement, indicating a return to normal functionality for the majority of users.
Despite the resolution, some users continued to experience minor issues such as slow-loading videos into Thursday morning, October 16. YouTube’s status page confirmed that teams were monitoring the situation to ensure a full recovery and expressed appreciation for user patience during the approximately two-hour disruption.
This incident underscores the critical role that digital platforms like YouTube play in daily life and the significant impact that service disruptions can have on a global scale. It also highlights the importance of prompt communication and resolution strategies in maintaining user trust and satisfaction.
