YouTube restored after brief global outage

2026-02-18 - 03:13

BANGKOK — 18 February 2026, YouTube experienced a widespread outage early Tuesday, disrupting access for users across multiple countries before service was restored later in the morning. User reports of problems began surfacing shortly before 08:00, with many saying they were unable to load the homepage, stream videos or access certain features on both desktop and mobile apps. Data from outage tracking site Downdetector showed a sharp spike in reports during the same period, indicating a surge in disruptions affecting users in several regions, including Asia, Europe and North America. Some users reported seeing error messages such as “Something went wrong,” while others encountered blank screens or loading failures. Reports also suggested intermittent issues with related services. Shortly after 09:00, and many users said access had returned to normal. Parent company Google had not publicly detailed the cause of the disruption as of publication. Major outages affecting globally used platforms are uncommon but can quickly impact millions of viewers, content creators and advertisers worldwide.