YouTube Outage Takes Down Home, Shorts, And Subscriptions

The internet's second most popular website is experiencing a partial outage that, at best, has taken down the platform's Subscriptions feed. Users who attempt to view the feed, which contains videos from channels they subscribe to, report experiencing one of a few different issues, the most common of which appears to be a message stating that their watch history has been disabled. 

Users who are able to load the feed state that they're unable to get the videos to play. In our own tests, SlashGear encountered both issues: a perpetually-spinning loading animation on videos from the Subscriptions feed when accessed on Android, and the watch history notice when accessing YouTube on desktop. Similar issues with loading videos were encountered on iOS.

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The issue also appears to be impacting both the Home and Shorts feeds for some users who report seeing the same watch history message displayed in the Subscriptions feed. Other sections of the website and mobile app remain accessible, however. At the time of writing, videos are displayed like usual within the Trending, Music, Shopping, News, Gaming, and other genre-based feeds. During our testing, we were able to play videos accessed through those specific categories without issue. The reason for the outage is unknown at this time.

Downdetector, a website that publishes real-time reports and data on potential outages, showed a spike in reports involving YouTube starting at around 9:30 p.m. EST. The reports continued for more than an hour. At the time of writing, YouTube has not shared any statements about the issue on its X (formerly Twitter) accounts. If history is any indication, this issue will likely be resolved in the near future.

This isn't the first outage to hit a major tech platform in 2024. As of April, Meta has experienced two major service outages, including one that made everything from Threads to WhatsApp unusable for many people. While outages over at Meta aren't unusual, more surprising was an April outage that briefly took down many core Apple services, including the App Store and subscription services like Apple TV+ and Apple Music. In both cases, the outages were resolved within a handful of hours.