YouTube & Google Hit By Ongoing Outages As Reports Spike

For a brief moment on yesterday, everyone in the world simultaneously pressed the refresh button on their gadgets, questioned their internet connection, and wondered whether or not it was time to socialise. No one know what was happening if it was their network provider having glitches or a looming outage, however the experience was poor in terms of service delivery.

For thousands of users, YouTube, the website that offers everything from last-minute tutorials to music breaks, remained dark for a moment, as it was not loading even though user were trying to refresh their web page and application, however the option was not just working in everyone’s favour. This served as a reminder that, once more, that, the quiet of the internet is far more powerful than its roar.

And later it was discovered that alphabet-owned YouTube experienced a brief but notable outage on Friday that prevented users from accessing the platform for a period in many parts of the world. The number of interruption reports rose quickly.

It was also later perceived that Google also had the same brief and notable outage which also affected users from accessing the platform for the said period in some parts of the world.

The restoration and recovery good news arrived nearly as quickly as the outage or incident itself. At roughly 9:00 a.m. ET, Downdetector reported that the problems had dropped to about 200 people, indicating that YouTube was largely operational again. Reports of the outage in the UK quickly decreased from a peak of over 3000 to roughly 70.

For Youtube, as Downdetector had observed the surge of the reported incident and outage, it was seen that nearly 10,995 users were affected and it had reported via Downdetector as seen below.

For Google, as observed by Downdetector, it was also observed that the incident and outage report was just 493, which was as much as that of Youtube, and it occurred some minutes after YouTube Outage.

Canada also saw a speedy recovery, which suggests that the disturbance was efficiently handled in a number of areas.

The actual number of affected users may differ because Downdetector’s figures are based on user-submitted reports and other public indications. The sharp decline in complaints, however, was a clear sign that the system was recovering quickly.

Despite receiving a lot of attention, YouTube did not respond to enquiries about the reason for the outage right away. Such restriction gives rise to conjecture while also demonstrating a trend that is rather common: service interruptions are brief, and information is not even provided until the problem is fixed.

Whether the outage was caused by a server issue, a backend bug, or just a standard technical issue is yet unknown.

Even though the disruption was brief, it served as a gentle reminder of YouTube’s pervasiveness in everyday digital life. Thousands of reports were generated in a matter of minutes due to a slight disturbance, demonstrating the platform’s extensive reach and the audience’s strong reliance on it for a variety of uses, including work, pleasure, and information.

Even the biggest platforms occasionally experience technological difficulties, as evidenced by YouTube’s minor malfunction, which was not catastrophic but was nonetheless highly apparent and obvious. Strong infrastructure is indicated by the swift recovery, but the story also shows how quickly a disruption may propagate throughout the internet.

For the time being, the internet is back to its regular programming, YouTube is back, and the refresh buttons are not working. Same also goes to Google as it is back. 

For now the cause of the outage is still much unknown as some has linked it up to an update implementation to its core algorithm which was done earlier this month, precisely on December 11th. Other than that, its service site is silent right now, which might be a sign of a less severe outage. 

With around 10,000 reports of issues on the well-known video service in the last hour, the number of claims of an outage on YouTube is significantly larger than that of Google and Google TV. In contrast, Google and Google TV have hundreds of reports.

Determining the spread of any significant outage is a challenge. As mentioned, the fact that three Google services are impacted by these notable spikes suggests that Google has an internal issue which is not known as of the moment of this post.

Not everyone was impacted, even though they are rising in the UK and the US. For example, my own Google is currently operating without any issues.

Some other suspected an early Cloudflare disruption that could have affected the YouTube and Google services which also occurred this Friday morning, as there were reports of some early Cloudflare disruptions. Although Cloudflare claims to have been keeping an eye on a network performance problem, a solution was put in place approximately an hour ago.

At this point, it’s unclear if they are specific to Google’s services or if they’re a part of a more widespread outage of a provider like Cloudflare or Azure.