YouTube experienced what appeared to be global access problems Tuesday evening for at least 90 minutes, with issues that also affected the YouTube TV and YouTube Music services.
At 9:41 p.m. ET, the Team YouTube account on Twitter posted about the technical issues: “Thanks for your reports about YouTube, YouTube TV and YouTube Music access issues. We’re working on resolving this and will let you know once fixed. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and will keep you updated.”
Access to YouTube videos began to be restored around 10:45 p.m. ET, per user reports. According to user reports and outage-monitoring sites, the YouTube outages began sometime around 9:15 p.m. ET.
During the outage, when users tried to access YouTube videos, they encountered error messages, like the one below. In addition, visiting YouTube.com produced a blank screen with only the YouTube logo displayed. Attempts to visit individual channels on the website returned “500 Internal Server Error” messages.
On the YouTube mobile app, users saw the “Error loading / Tap to retry” error message when they attempted to play videos. Similar to the website, the YouTube app showed blank areas on the homescreen, while navigating to the “trending,” “subscriptions” and “library” tabs returned error messages.
YouTube’s search functions were still functioning on the web and mobile — however, the videos were not playable from the results screen.
Reps for YouTube did not respond to a request for more information.
For YouTube, massive and prolonged outages have been unusual. In July, the YouTube TV subscription-television service in the U.S. went down for at least an hour in the middle of the World Cup semifinal between England and Croatia; as part of apologizing to users, YouTube extended one week credit to YouTube TV customers.