New Delhi, Feb 18: A malfunction within YouTube’s recommendation software triggered a massive global outage on Wednesday, leaving thousands of users in India unable to load videos or access the mobile app. The disruption prompted an immediate response from Google, which confirmed that its engineering department was investigating the root cause of the widespread “something went wrong” notifications.
The glitch manifested across the entire YouTube ecosystem, impacting the main site along with specialized services like YouTube Music and YouTube Kids. According to a statement provided on the company’s help page, “an issue with our recommendations system prevented videos from appearing across surfaces on YouTube.”
The impact was particularly notable in India, where over 19,000 individual reports were logged as users started their day. This mirrored a larger trend in the United States, where Downdetector monitored more than 320,000 instances of reported downtime. Many users declared that they were unable to even open the application, while others maintained that videos simply failed to buffer.
“Our teams are aware, and we’ll provide updates as soon as we have them,” a Google representative affirmed during the initial stages of the recovery process. The company later clarified that while the homepage was back online, a full fix for all surfaces was still being finalized by technical staff.
The scale of the outage serves as a reminder of the platform’s massive reach, as it currently supports a user base exceeding 2.5 billion people. Although some Google services experienced elevated complaint levels during the window of instability, the primary focus of the recovery effort remained on stabilizing the video delivery network.
