How many times has YouTube gone down in its history?

Tonight, YouTube is down (or experiencing at least a partial/global outage). Starting around 7:45-7:59 PM ET on February 17, millions of users worldwide are seeing error messages like "Something Went Wrong," blank screens, videos that won't load, or the app simply refusing to respond. The issue is hitting both the website and mobile app, YouTube TV, and to a lesser extent other Google-related services.

According to Downdetector (the main outage tracking tool), there have been over 320,000 reports in the United States alone in the first few hours, with peaks exceeding 317,000-321,000 in the US. Additional tens of thousands of reports are coming in from the UK, India, Europe, and Latin America. While these figures only reflect people who actively report the problem (not the total number affected), they clearly point to a global and major incident.

YouTube has around 2.7 to 2.85 billion monthly active users as of 2025-2026 (per sources like DataReportal, Business of Apps, and Global Media Insight). On a typical day, 120-211 million users log in.

Given the time zones and geographic spread (especially peak evening hours in North America and early morning in Europe), reasonable estimates suggest tens of millions of people-likely 50 to 150 million-are impacted simultaneously during the worst parts of this outage.

YouTube and YouTube TV crash during prime-time viewing hours

Interestingly, YouTube is one of the most reliable platforms on the planet. Massive global outages like this are extremely rare. Since its launch in 2005, only a handful of incidents have reached this scale:

• October 2018: One of the most notorious. It lasted about 1 hour and 2 minutes. It affected YouTube, YouTube Music, and YouTube TV worldwide, causing widespread panic on social media and reportedly costing Google millions in ad revenue.
• December 2020: Part of a broader Google outage (Gmail, Drive, YouTube, etc.) that lasted roughly 45 minutes. YouTube was hit hard; estimates suggest Google lost around $1.7 million in ad revenue during that short window.
• October 2025: A more recent one (October 15-16), with over 800,000 to 1 million reports on Downdetector. It lasted several hours (about 1-2 hours at peak severity) and disrupted global streaming.
• Other minor ones: A 2008 incident (caused by an accidental Pakistan block that lasted hours), brief spikes during the 2018 World Cup, and various regional outages in 2019-2023 (usually minutes to under an hour).

In nearly all cases, major global YouTube outages last between 30 minutes and 2 hours. They rarely exceed 3 hours, thanks to Google's massive redundancy (distributed data centers, CDNs, automatic failover). For today's outage, it began a few hours ago, and while there's no detailed official update from @TeamYouTube beyond "we're investigating," historical patterns suggest it should resolve within the next 1-2 hours at most.

In the meantime, the digital world grinds to a brief halt: creators pause streams, families can't queue up videos for kids, memes about "the end of the internet" flood X and TikTok (which, ironically, are still up), and plenty of people rediscover that offline life exists. It's a stark reminder of how dependent we've become on these platforms. How much longer will it last? Hopefully not long. Once it's back, the first video to explode will probably be someone filming "YouTube is back."