On Wednesday afternoon (early Thursday morning in India), many American users were unable to access YouTube. With over 800,000 users complaining about the outage, DownDetector, a website that monitors outages based on user reports, revealed a significant disruption with YouTube services.

Additionally, thousands reported experiencing an outage with YouTubeTV and YouTube Music, the music streaming service. 

According to DownDetector, streaming video and music accounted for 54 per cent of issues reported by users.

The United States reported the majority of the YouTube service interruptions. In every major city, the services were impacted, according to DownDetector. Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Chicago, New York, Washington, and Detroit were among the cities most impacted.

When it began

The outage began quietly on Wednesday evening but quickly snowballed into global chaos. Around 7:00 pm ET (4:30 am IST Thursday), users began to see the following message on their screens: "An error occurred. Please try again later.”

On mobile, the YouTube app displayed the message "Something went wrong." The problem wasn't restricted to videos, however. Streaming on YouTube Music was halted, although users may continue to play offline downloads.

By 7:12 PM ET, data from DownDetector showed a massive spike in complaints — over 800,000 for YouTube, with YouTube Music and YouTube TV logging thousands more.

YouTube has not yet disclosed the reason behind the outage, despite speculation that it might be a DDOS attack.