YouTube restored after suffering outage for two hours
February 18, 2026 09:01 am
YouTube experienced an access outage starting at around 6:30 a.m. today, with all functions restored by around 08:30 a.m.
According to the reports, issues such as videos not playing and the home screen not loading properly occurred on YouTube’s mobile app and PC web platform, with all functions restored after about two hours.
Google, which operates YouTube, has not yet disclosed a clear cause, but the tech industry has suggested that the issue was likely caused by a surge in users during the Lunar New Year holiday.
YouTube has previously experienced intermittent global or country-specific outages. On October 16, 2018, users worldwide faced a major outage where video access was completely unavailable for approximately 1 to 1.5 hours. In June 2023, there was also a surge in access error reports on YouTube and YouTube TV, leading to thousands of outage reports at one point.
In June of last year, there were consecutive reports in North America, the UK, and other regions of videos not loading and web pages freezing. In October 2025, there were reports of a service disruption in South Korea due to an error during maintenance. Recently, in January 2026, there was a temporary error stating “Content cannot be used.”
- Agencies
