YouTube outage explained: What caused the global disruption

YouTube experienced a global outage on Tuesday evening, with thousands of users reporting problems beginning around 8:00 p.m. ET.

The company later confirmed that the disruption was caused by an issue with its recommendations system — the algorithm responsible for suggesting videos based on users’ viewing history, News.Az reports, citing foreign media.

In a statement posted on its official TeamYouTube account on X, YouTube said the glitch prevented videos from appearing across multiple platforms, including the homepage, the YouTube app, YouTube Music and YouTube Kids.

“Update: An issue with our recommendations system prevented videos from appearing across surfaces on YouTube,” the company said, adding that the homepage had been restored while work continued on a full fix.

If you’re having trouble accessing YouTube right now, you’re not alone — our teams are looking into this and will follow up here with updates: https://t.co/7iTU5S9AgT

— TeamYouTube (@TeamYouTube) February 18, 2026

Additional details were also shared on a support page by parent company Google.

It provided a further update within the hour: "We're also seeing a small number of reports that some people are unable to login to YouTube TV. This is related to the broader issue across YouTube, and we're also working on a fix here."

Finally, around 10:15 p.m. ET, the company shared a "final update," which stated: "The issue with our recommendations system has been resolved and all of our platforms (YouTube.com, the YouTube app, YouTube Music, Kids, and TV) are back to normal! We really appreciate you bearing with us while we sorted this out."

Crowdsourced outage tracker Downdetector saw a spike in activity for YouTube on Tuesday evening, with the platform receiving more than 1.6 million user error reports in the last 24 hours. (Disclosure: Mashable and Downdetector share the same parent company, Ziff Davis.) Approximately half of these reports came from the U.S., with users encountering issues with the video-sharing platform's app and website, though people across the globe were impacted.

News.Az 

By Nijat Babayev