By Reuters staff, published by Hindustan Times, and Daily Express
YOUTUBE, owned by Alphabet Inc’s Google , said late on Wednesday it had fixed a glitch that led to a worldwide outage of the video-streaming service.
DownDetector.com, a website which monitors outages, showed nearly 286,000 incidents of people reporting issues with the service.
The issue started at around 6:53 p.m. ET (6:53 a.m. in Thailand), according to DownDetector.com, with users complaining about trouble in watching videos on the platform.
“We’re so sorry for the interruption. This is fixed across all devices & YouTube services,” YouTube said in a tweet, without explaining what had caused the outage.
Google did not respond to a Reuters request for comment on the outage.
According to the Daily Express, users began reporting issues just after midnight UK time, according to DownDetector.com, which monitors whether a site is working or not. According to its live map, the issue was reported all around the world, across Europe and the US but also in South America, Australia and South East Asia.
The website itself appeared to load successfully, with the search bar and video thumbnails all operating as normal.
However, when a video was clicked, the buffer wheel turned indefinitely with the video refusing to load.
Some users reported that the video did eventually load, though it took an unusually long time to do so.
Users flocked to social media to discuss the site crash. One said: “So 2020 killed YouTube now.”
Another says: “YouTube went down again. I spent a solid 10 minutes confused on why videos weren’t loading.”
Many said they attempted to switch between their mobile phone network to a WiFi connection in order to fix the issue, without success.
Others resorted to turning their phones off and on, while some even uninstalled their YouTube application and reinstalled it.
Many appeared to have taken the incident in good humour as memes circulated within minutes of the crash, gathering thousands of likes.
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Top: YouTube logo. Photo: Rego Korosi (CC BY-SA 2.0)
