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how long has youtube been down

YouTube recently experienced a major outage, but it wasn’t down for very long in strict clock time—roughly 90 minutes to about 2 hours for most users, depending on time zone and region.

Quick Scoop: How long has YouTube been down?

Here’s the timeline for the most recent big outage (February 17, 2026):

  • First big spike of problems:
    • Around 7:45–8:00 PM Eastern Time (ET) users began reporting that YouTube was not working properly.
  • Peak of the outage:
    • Hundreds of thousands of reports worldwide, with users unable to load the homepage, recommendations, subscriptions, or certain videos, across web and apps.
  • Initial fix:
    • By about 9:15–9:30 PM ET , reports started dropping and many users could load YouTube again, though some features were still flaky.
  • “All clear” update:
    • Around 10:10–10:15 PM ET , YouTube’s team announced the issue was “completely fixed” and all platforms (YouTube, YouTube TV, Music, Kids) were back to normal.

So in practical terms:

  • Full or near-full outage window: about 1.5 hours for most people.
  • Partial issues (recommendations, homepage, etc.) lingered: up to roughly 2 hours from first major reports to final “everything is normal” statement.

What exactly was broken?

According to Google and multiple tech outlets, the outage was tied to YouTube’s recommendations system , which caused:

  • Homepages to appear blank or error out.
  • Recommendations and feeds (like subscriptions, sometimes Shorts) to misbehave or fail to load.
  • In some regions, both the site and apps showed generic “something went wrong” messages.
  • For a period, YouTube TV and parts of YouTube Music/Kids were also affected, but they recovered as the core platform came back.

Despite this, a subset of users could still watch videos via direct links or existing history/queues even while the homepage and discovery features were down.

Why does it feel “longer” than 90 minutes?

On social platforms and outage trackers, the outage felt huge because:

  • Reports came from North America, Europe, Asia, and beyond , making it a global event.
  • DownDetector and similar sites showed hundreds of thousands of outage reports in a short time.
  • People were mid-stream, mid-dinner, or posting content when it suddenly stopped working, so the disruption felt dramatic and very “in the moment.”

So even though the technical downtime was under a couple of hours, the perception online was closer to: “YouTube is completely broken tonight.”

Current status: Is YouTube still down?

  • Official status: YouTube says the problem with its recommendation system has been resolved and that all platforms are functioning normally following the outage.
  • Tech outlets covering the incident report that the outage is over , though they note this was one of the more significant YouTube disruptions in recent memory.

If you’re still having trouble right now, it’s more likely to be:

  • A local/cache issue on your device or network.
  • A smaller, regional glitch instead of the same global outage.

Mini FAQ

Q: So, how long has YouTube been down in this latest incident?
A: Roughly 90 minutes of major disruption , up to about 2 hours including the tail end of partial issues.

Q: Was this global?
A: Yes, reports came in from multiple continents, with particularly heavy reporting in the U.S. and UK.

Q: Is it safe to use now?
A: Yes. YouTube and multiple independent trackers say services are back to normal following the fix.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.