Huge YouTube & YouTube TV Outage Affects Millions in Maine, New Hampshire, & Massachusetts

If you were having trouble watching videos on YouTube, or streaming your favorite shows on YouTube TV last night, you are not alone.

Apparently, just as people were sitting down to watch their favorite events in the Winter Olympics, the service crashed.

According to an article on the CNET website, about a million users in the U.S. and hundreds of thousands worldwide reported their feeds going dark, according to Downdetector. Reports started climbing around 8 PM Eastern Time and spiked fast, hitting over 338,000 just ten minutes later.

By about 9:30 PM Eastern Time, things were calming down, with reports dropping below 50,000.

Parent company Google later explained that a problem with YouTube’s recommendation system kept videos from showing up across the platform, including the homepage, the app, YouTube Music, and YouTube Kids.

The outage seemed to affect people differently.  My daughters could only watch YouTube videos that they had previously watched.  I could use YouTube TV on my phone, but not on the TV.  Other people in our area seemed to have no problems at all.

YouTube also told CNET the issue has since been fixed. Translation: the algorithm woke up from its nap

I was a little surprised by the reason for the outage.  When it first happened, I assumed that it was going to be another CloudFlare issue or a problem with Amazon Web Services.  I did not expect it was going to be an issue with the YouTube algorithm.