James Ratcliff joined GameRant in 2022 as Gaming News Writer. In 2023, James was offered the chance to become an occasional feature writer and then a feature writer in 2025. He is a third-generation Texan who has written professionally for local newspapers for over a decade, covering a variety of topics for his readers. As of 2024, James has focused entirely on gaming coverage.
[UPDATE: As of 12:00 AM Eastern, most YouTube functions have returned to normal. The outage lasted approximately two hours. Although some DownDetector user reports still indicated possible issues with the desktop and mobile sites, all YouTube services are back online. YouTube has not officially commented on the site’s earlier issues. The original story is as follows.]
YouTube, the world's most popular video site, is experiencing worldwide technical issues and is down for most users. YouTube users took to social media to discuss the issue, reporting that the outage affects both the desktop and mobile versions of Google's video service.
As the global leader in user-submitted video content, YouTube videos have been a global pastime since 2000. Along with short and long-form videos, YouTube has grown into a popular streaming service. In addition, users can watch traditional TV shows and movies through the YouTube TV subscription service. Although YouTube's policy has been controversial, it hasn't stopped users from coming back to watch their favorite content creators on the platform.
YouTube users report widespread site outage
However, YouTube users who want to catch up on some of the videos are unable to do so at the time of writing. User reports on DownDetector indicated that YouTube was experiencing a massive service outage as of 7:40 PM ET. By 8:10 PM ET, 338,308 user reports of the ongoing YouTube outage had been posted to DownDetector. Although some features such as the Subscriptions tab and live channel pages still work, the YouTube homepage and YouTube TV are unavailable for most users.
This is a developing message. YouTube outage information will be updated here as it becomes available.
