YouTube is up and running again after going through a worldwide outage. The unintended downtime also appeared to have affected other related services including YouTube TV and Google TV (formerly Google Play Movies and TV). YouTube acknowledged the issue in a tweet posted around 5.30am IST on November 12, saying that the team was working on a fix. Users had started complaining about the issue a few minutes earlier. The outage seems to have persisted up till 7.40am IST, around the time when YouTube tweeted to inform users that it had been fixed.
DownDetector.com, a website that monitors internet outages globally and across social media platforms, showed nearly 286,000 complaints from users highlighting the issue. This was noted around 6am IST when the Down Detector graph had peaked with complaints about YouTube. According to the website, the issue started around 6:53pm ET (5:23am IST), with users saying that they were having trouble watching videos on the platform.
YouTube informed users that its services were back online some two hours later via a tweet saying that the services were fixed across all devices and YouTube services. The update was, however, without any explanation on what had caused the outage.
…And we’re back – we’re so sorry for the interruption. This is fixed across all devices & YouTube services, thanks for being patient with us ❤️ https://t.co/1s0qbxQqc6
— TeamYouTube (@TeamYouTube) November 12, 2020
The YouTube website was able to load just fine but videos did not stream as they should have and continued to show the loading wheel for up to a minute before throwing a playback error, as reported by The Verge. The report said that all error messages could be cleared with a simple refresh after YouTube apprised users on Twitter that its services had been fixed.
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