YouTube suffers major worldwide service outage

Google-owned video platform YouTube suffered a major outage on November 11, leaving users around the world unable to watch or upload content.

Reports started to emerge on social media on Wednesday night that the service was down, before YouTube confirmed as much in a tweet at around 12:30am GMT.

This was not just an issue with the core YouTube platform, but any service using YouTube’s infrastructure. This included premium cord-cutting service YouTube TV and movies and shows purchased through Google TV.

YouTube confirmed that the issue, which presented users with an error message when trying to watch videos, had been resolved less than two hours later.

All YouTube services subsequently came back online, but not before more than 280,000 reports were filed on DownDetector.

YouTube is yet to confirm what the technical issue was, but it may serve as a concern for one of the most-visited websites on the internet. The company estimates that over 2 billion logged-in users visit YouTube each month, and that over a billion hours of video are watched every day. This would mean that the outage, at over an hour, would have cost YouTube at least 83 million views across the platform.