One moment, people minding their own business were scrolling through YouTube Shorts. Suddenly, YouTube glitched and the screen froze.
The most logical thing for people to do was restart their device and hope for the best. However, this was not the case on Feb. 17.
What seemed like an ordinary day for online users soon turned into a significant outage.
The outage began around 8 p.m. and lasted nearly two hours.
At its peak, 350,000 users reported problems accessing videos. The most common complaint was that YouTube was not working.
As videos refused to load and pages remained stuck, confusion spread across social media within minutes. Viewers searched for answers, wondering how long the disruption would last and what had caused it in the first place. Many users even took it upon themselves to investigate the spread of the issue by logging onto for updates.
One user said, “Same can’t log in,” while another added that the homepage showed a message saying something had gone wrong and videos would not load.
These shared reactions helped confirm that the issue was widespread and not isolated to a single device or internet connection.
People across the U.S. and other countries quickly realized that they were all experiencing the same problem.
This sudden silence was a rare occurrence and unexpected disruption.
Reports suggested that the outage was caused by a failure in YouTube’s recommendation system.
This system focuses on loading the homepage and suggesting videos.
Since it plays such a major role, the glitch prevented normal use for numerous users.
Without recommended content or a properly loading homepage, even simple actions like selecting a video became difficult. Numerous viewers were left disconnected from the platform they relied on. The outage alone showed that without social media, society can’t cope.
Although YouTube has addressed the main problem, some technical issues remain.
The YouTube mobile app still shows an “error occurred” message. Despite this, the YouTube website is back and functioning normally.
