YouTube's Major Outage Recovery Completed: The Full Story Behind Over 30,000 Users Unable to Access the Platform
\n Sudden YouTube Service Outage: What Happened? (Is YouTube Down) On February 17, 2026, around 5:30 PM, over 30,000 YouTube users, primarily in the US West Coast, experienced unexpected access disruptions. Just as they tried to watch videos as usual, the screen went blank or recommended videos disappeared, naturally pushing the search term “is youtube down” to skyrocket. The heart of this outage wasn’t a simple “server shutdown” but an issue with YouTube’s recommendation system . Google explained that due to this recommendation system glitch, videos failed to display across multiple surfaces—including the homepage, YouTube app, YouTube Music, and YouTube Kids. In other words, the service wasn’t completely down, but users faced a major disruption as “videos simply didn’t appear where they were supposed to.” Fortunately, recovery was relatively swift. Google began fixing the problem around 7:30 PM (Pacific Standard Time) , and by 7:45 PM, the number of outage re...