YouTube Experiences Major Outage Affecting Users Across the U.S.

On January 18th, the final day of the Lunar New Year holiday, YouTube users experienced significant delays in accessing the service.

According to the IT industry, starting around 10 AM, error messages began appearing on both the YouTube mobile app and website, preventing users from accessing the homepage. However, video playback through subscription lists or search functions remained unaffected, indicating an issue specifically with the homepage access.

Statistics from Downdetector confirmed a surge in error reports related to YouTube during the same timeframe. The site recorded over 300,000 outage reports in the U.S. alone. Additionally, YouTube TV and Google websites experienced approximately 9,000 and 2,000 access issues, respectively, at the same time.

YouTube addressed the issue, stating, "Due to a problem with our recommendation system, videos were not displaying on all screens of YouTube, including the homepage, app, YouTube Music, and YouTube Kids. The homepage has been restored, and we are working towards a complete resolution." The service was reported to be fully operational again by around 11:30 AM.

Cloudflare, a content delivery network (CDN) provider, announced that the issue stemmed from a problem in the certificate generation process by Google Trust Services. Google Trust Services acknowledged the error and stated that they would distribute a patch to rectify the issue.

Reported by Min-Kyung Lee, TenAsia 2min_ror@tenasia.co.kr