YouTube has recovered from a seemingly worldwide outage that prevented videos from loading for roughly an hour.
If you’re having trouble watching videos on YouTube right now, you’re not alone – our team is aware of the issue and working on a fix. We’ll follow up here with any updates.
— TeamYouTube (@TeamYouTube) November 12, 2020
Team YouTube acknowledged the issue, noting that it was working on a fix, which has since rolled out.
Near the end of the outage, YouTube started displaying an error message, stating that “An error occurred (Playback ID: [a unique alphanumeric string goes here]) Tap to retry).” It’s unclear what the root cause of the issue was, as the above statement from YouTube is decidedly vague. The outage also occurred during what is the start of prime viewing time in the US, and has generated massive amounts of complaints on social media.
DownDetector showed a truly tremendous number of user reports of problems with YouTube, indicating the problem was widespread — the DownDetector graph peaked with more than 280,000 user reports in less than an hour. Numerous users on Twitter reported that YouTube wasn’t working for them, either, and searches spiked for “is YouTube down.”
