YouTube Experienced Technical Issues Worldwide: It’s Now Fixed
Nikki Attkisson | Last Updated : November 12, 2020YouTube users in multiple regions experienced some technical issues in playing videos on Wednesday night. But the service was restored by the company after widespread outage on the streaming platform. YouTube confirmed that at 7:23 PM ET that something was going on and they tweeted that, “If you are having trouble watching videos on YouTube right now, you are not alone- our team is aware of the issues and working on a fix. We will follow up here with any updates”.
Two hours later, YouTube service had been restored “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,” the account tweeted, adding a red heart emoji.The issues were resolved around 9:15 p.m. ET. YouTube users quickly noticed the outage and expressed their displeasure.
Around 284,273 people had reported the YouTube outage worldwide with most of the outages being reported from the northeastern region of the United States as well as Florida, parts of the South and California. Complaints came from outside the USA also, from Colombia, Brazil, Argentina, Australia, Western Europe and Japan. The playback error left some users with an endlessly spinning wheel as videos failed to load, and some others reported getting an error message.
The Worldwide Outage Affected Millions Of Users
The outage of YouTube affected millions of users around the globe and the hashtag #YouTubeDown was trending on multiple social media platforms. Many users posted screenshots of an error message they were seeing. Even though services were restored in a few hours, by then there were plenty of reactions to the situation on social media.
The worldwide outage also affected other services like YouTube TV and the movies and TV shows you’d purchase through Google TV or Google Play Movies & TV. Things seemed to be back as early as 8:30PM ET and videos played on YouTube’s website seemed to be working as they normally do. The problem was evident in both desktop and mobile apps, as well as connected-TV devices including Google’s Chromecast. Even YouTube ads were also not loading during the technical outage.
This is the second time in 2020 that YouTube is having a major issue. A G Suite outage happened in August and users opinionated that YouTube doesn’t have a typical server status page to track issues. Outages and technical issues like that happened on Wednesday are not frequently happening from the side of YouTube or any video streaming platform of Google as they are rock solid.
As of now, YouTube has 2+ billion users and this makes YouTube Google’s most popular service, with even more users than Gmail. Even though the outage mainly affected the USA, the country which uses YouTube most. When it comes to all-time subscribers, the USA holds the top spot. Thus the outage has affected around 286,000 users and they were unable to watch videos owing to loading issues. As of now, YouTube has cleared all issues and has now announced that all issues across its devices and services have been fixed. But it has no explanation why this worldwide outage occurred for this giant platform.
With over 15 years as a practicing journalist, Nikki Attkisson found herself at Powdersville Post now after working at several other publications. She is an award-winning journalist with an entrepreneurial spirit and worked as a journalist covering technology, innovation, environmental issues, politics, health etc. Nikki Attkisson has also worked on product development, content strategy, and editorial management for numerous media companies. She began her career at local news stations and worked as a reporter in national newspapers.