YouTube suffered a global outage on Tuesday, with thousands of people reporting issues with the platform from around 8:00 p.m. ET. Now, we know what caused it.
In a statement posted to the official TeamYouTube X account, the company revealed that the outage was caused by a problem with the recommendations system. This algorithmic system is responsible for offering you videos it thinks you’ll want to watch based on your past viewing habits. The company provided additional details on a Google support page.
“Update: An issue with our recommendations system prevented videos from appearing across surfaces on YouTube (including the homepage, the YouTube app, YouTube Music and YouTube Kids),” the company explained. “The homepage is back, but we’re still working on a full fix — more coming soon!”
