Social Media
YouTube
YouTube is the world's largest video platform, hosting everything from music and tutorials to live streams and feature-length documentaries.
What is YouTube?
Is YouTube down? YouTube is the world's largest video-sharing and streaming platform, founded in February 2005 by former PayPal employees Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim, and acquired by Google in October 2006 for $1.65 billion. Today it serves over 2.7 billion logged-in users per month and reaches an even larger audience including non-logged-in viewers, making it the second most visited website globally after Google Search itself. More than 500 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute, and viewers collectively watch over a billion hours of content daily.
YouTube's infrastructure is part of Google's broader cloud ecosystem, delivered through Google's global CDN and data centre network. The platform encompasses YouTube.com, YouTube Music, YouTube Premium, YouTube TV (US), YouTube Kids, and YouTube Shorts — each with distinct back-end components, though they share core authentication through Google accounts. Google's investment in infrastructure means YouTube is among the most reliably available streaming services, but global incidents, CDN failures, and authentication service disruptions still occur periodically.
YouTube outages, even brief ones, generate some of the highest social media activity of any service disruption because of YouTube's central role in information, entertainment, and education worldwide. Searches for "YouTube down", "YouTube not loading", and "is YouTube down" spike dramatically within seconds of any widespread disruption, often trending globally on X (Twitter) within minutes.
Outage.gg tracks real-time YouTube outage reports from users around the world, providing immediate confirmation when a YouTube server outage or service disruption is confirmed and trending.
Common YouTube Problems
Issues users most frequently report when YouTube is having problems.
Messages not sending
Messages appear stuck, fail to deliver, or recipients are not receiving them.
Login & authentication
Unable to sign in, 2FA not working, or being unexpectedly logged out.
Feed & content not loading
Posts, stories, or notifications are not appearing or are failing to refresh.
App & website errors
The app or website returns error pages, crashes, or is completely unreachable.
Frequently Asked Questions
Common questions about YouTube outages and server status.
You can check the live YouTube server status at outage.gg/services/youtube. The page shows real-time community-submitted outage reports, an hourly trend chart, and the current health status.
YouTube can stop working for a number of reasons including scheduled maintenance windows, unexpected server failures, network infrastructure problems, or DDoS attacks. Check the live status page on Outage.gg for the latest community reports to see if others are experiencing the same issue.
Go to outage.gg/services/youtube and click the "Report an Issue" button. Your report is counted immediately and helps confirm whether a problem is widespread. Reports from multiple users trigger a status change visible to everyone watching the page.
Click the "Notify Me" bell button on the YouTube status page at outage.gg/services/youtube. Create a free account and we will send you an email the moment YouTube comes back online — no app download required.
Yes. You can find official announcements at the YouTube website: https://www.youtube.com. For real-time community outage data, Outage.gg tracks user reports as they happen and often picks up problems before official announcements.
Related Services
Other services you might be tracking alongside YouTube.
