YouTube suffers two-hour long outage; frustrated users demand free services

Google-owned YouTube suffered a major outage late Wednesday, affecting over 200,000 users globally.

DownDetector.com showed nearly 286,000 people reporting issues. DownDetector.com is a website that monitors outages. The issue, according to the website started at around 6:53 p.m. ET (23:53 GMT). The users complained about having trouble watching videos on the platform.

The issue was fixed two hours later and it left thousands of affected users frustrated. Premium users even demanded for one month of free access.

“premium subscribers definitely deserve a free month for this, just saying”, said a Twitter user Dalek Bricks.

Some users also attributed this outage to be Google’s technique for not allowing users to access election-related content.

"Why do I feel like Google did this to stop people being able to see all the videos about the election?" asked one.

Launched in 2005, YouTube rarely suffers outages. The last time this happened was in 2018. The outage was of the same magnitude as this time. All of its services including TV and music went down globally. Services were, however, partially restored within 1.5 hours and fully restored within 2 hours.

Interestingly, this year has been tough for major companies in terms of servers going down. In September, Microsoft’s services including Office and OneDrive also faced a major outage which affected thousands of users worldwide. Similarly, Twitter and Gmail also reported almost an hour-long outage in the past few weeks.

YouTube’s official announcement on Twitter

“If you’re having trouble watching videos on YouTube right now, you’re not alone – our team is aware of the issue and working on a fix. We’ll follow up here with any updates.”, YouTube said acknowledging the issue.

“...And we’re back – we’re so sorry for the interruption. This is fixed across all devices & YouTube services, thanks for being patient with us”, the video streaming platform said in its second tweet.