YouTube down globally: Thousands of users face disruptions, complaints surface online, 'how am I supposed to eat...'

On Tuesday night, YouTube, a subsidiary of Alphabet, experienced a significant global outage, impacting users in various countries, including India. In the United States alone, over 320,000 complaints were recorded, according to outage monitoring service Downdetector. By 8:18 PM ET, the service noted 321,958 reports of issues, with earlier figures showing that around 283,490 users faced difficulties accessing the platform. The outage primarily affected YouTube TV, drawing 8,923 reports of issues, while Google itself received 2,694 complaints. The situation was not limited to the United States; in India, more than 18,000 users reported problems by 6:42 AM IST. Downdetector's data indicated that 71% of affected users in India struggled with the app, while 18% encountered issues with live streaming. Comparatively, in the US, 56% of complaints were related to the app, 21% to the website, and 12% to login difficulties. Many users worldwide were met with a “something went wrong” error message when attempting to access YouTube. The precise cause of the outage has yet to be determined. In response to the widespread disruption, YouTube issued a statement acknowledging the problem. “If you’re having trouble accessing YouTube right now, you’re not alone — our teams are looking into this and will follow up here with updates,” the platform communicated. Google Support also noted, “We’re aware some of you are having issues accessing YouTube right now. Our teams are aware, and we’ll provide updates as soon as we have them.” However, neither statement provided clarity on what caused the outage. As users struggled with access, many turned to social media, particularly X, to express their frustrations and share humorous memes, with some jokingly lamenting their inability to watch content. Comments ranged from the absurdity of having to eat without video distractions to the rush to alternative platforms as YouTube remained inaccessible.