You tap a video and the thumbnail freezes. The homepage greets you with a blunt Something went wrong. For more than an hour, what should have been background noise became a global silence.
I watched the reports roll in and I checked the same tools you probably did — Downdetector and Is It Down Right Now — while you tried to reload the app. Here’s what happened, what the signals mean, and what you might want to watch for next.
Phones lit up as thumbnails vanished — YouTube was Down for Over an Hour
Reports began on February 17 at about 8:00 PM (EST). For many users the web and mobile apps returned a terse “Something went wrong” message and thumbnails disappeared from the home and subscription feeds. I saw the site come back around 9:15 PM (EST), but Google and YouTube did not immediately offer an explanation.
The homepage looked like a theater with its curtains closed — a familiar place suddenly locked.
Downdetector and other tools lit up — what monitoring showed
Downdetector recorded a large spike in problem reports; Is It Down Right Now showed mixed signals depending on region. YouTube Music appeared largely unaffected for me and other testers, while YouTube TV and core Google services had scattered trouble reports.
Why is YouTube down right now?
Short answer: nobody from YouTube provided an immediate public cause during the outage. Third-party monitors capture user reports and success/failure rates, but those tools don’t replace an official post from YouTube or Google. If you saw errors, the likely culprits are routing, authentication, or content-delivery failures — the usual suspects when a major endpoint goes silent.
Is YouTube down for everyone?
Not always. Outages often hit regions unevenly. Some users reported complete failure; others could still stream via YouTube Music or access parts of the site. The pattern looked like a cluster interruption rather than a global DNS collapse — the stream of outage reports piled up like a traffic jam on the information superhighway.
Browsers and apps acted strangely — what to try and what to watch for
If you were affected, try these quick checks: reload the page, clear the app cache, test YouTube Music or another Google service, and check Downdetector for a pulse of reports in your area. I also recommend testing from a different network (cellular vs home Wi‑Fi) to see if the issue is local.
How long will the outage last?
This one ran from roughly 8:00 PM to 9:15 PM (EST) on February 17. Outage lengths vary wildly; some fixes are instant, others take hours. The real answer is: watch official channels for a follow-up from YouTube or Google and monitor Downdetector for decreasing report volume.
The service returned to normal for most users, homepages and subscriptions populated again, and video playback resumed. There’s still no official breakdown from Google explaining the root cause, which matters because transparency helps advertisers, creators, and viewers understand risk and recovery preparations.
I’ll keep an eye on any post-mortem from YouTube, and you should too — your favorite creator’s livelihood and your evening plans both depend on a platform that stays online. Who should be held to account for outages like this: the platform, the ISPs, or the tools that claim to measure uptime?