YouTube said its services are back to normal after a technical glitch left many users unable to load videos or see content on the home screen in several countries including the United States, Singapore, Australia and India.
The disruption seemed to focus on YouTube’s recommendation system which helps decide what videos show up on the homepage and other parts of the platform.
In updates posted during the incident, YouTube said the problem stopped videos from appearing in several places including the homepage and the app.
Outage tracker Downdetector recorded a sharp jump in reports that more than 320,000 user reports in the US at the peak while users in other countries also logged problems.
In Singapore, more than 2,900 reports of disruption were recorded on Downdetector at about 9.20am Singapore time on February 18 before the number fell sharply by midday.
The same report said Australia saw a peak of about 11,870 reports at around 9.14am Singapore time while India recorded 19,250 reports at about 9.50am.
Some users said they saw a blank homepage or error messages while direct links to videos still worked for parts of the outage.
YouTube also said there were a small number of reports of people being unable to log in to YouTube TV.
YouTube later said it had fixed the issue and that all its platforms including YouTube.com, the YouTube app and YouTube Music, Kids and TV were operating normally again.
Downdetector figures are based on user submitted reports and do not necessarily reflect the full scale of the disruption.
