YouTube Goes Offline For Thousand Of Users, Restored Now

Streaming platform YouTube suffered an outage for a couple of hours yesterday, leaving thousands of Indian users unable to access the platform through its website and app.

As per outage tracker Downdetector, the issue began to crop up around 5:33 PM, when hundreds of users flagged issues with the platform. The matter, however, peaked around 7:28 PM, with more than 3,700 users experiencing issues accessing the platform. 

Of the complaints, 54% users were facing ‘server connection’ issues and 34% reported website-related issues, while 12% struggled with ‘video streaming’ issues. 

However, the platform appears stable now, with complaints trickling back to the pre-outage levels. Notably, the platform also witnessed major complaints from its users in the US, Canada and the UK. 

YouTube has so far not released any official statement on the disruption so far. Meanwhile, users took to social media to raise their concerns and share memes on the outage. Hashtags like “#YouTubedown” also trended momentarily on X.

This comes a month after a major outage at internet traffic manager Cloudflare disrupted several global websites and apps, including homegrown players like Zerodha, Groww and Upstox. 

In June, OpenAI’s chatbot ChatGPT went offline for more than 16 hours, with consumers facing elevated error rates and latency issues. Even social media platform X has suffered at least two major outages this year, leaving thousands of users unable to access the app.

Back home, even the unified payments interface (UPI) also faced a major outage in August this year. At the time, the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) blamed the intermittent connectivity issues on technical issues at a “few” partner banks .

Prior to this in May, fintech major PhonePe also suffered a major tech outage. The company’s cofounder and chief technology officer (CTO) Rahul Chari then attributed the outage to a network capacity shortfall that led to transaction failure.