YouTube Goes Dark in Massive Outage Hitting 300K+ Users

YouTube hit a wall around 7:45pm ET, going down hard across the board. Feeds wouldn't load. Shorts broke. The homepage? Gone. The whole platform essentially became a loading screen.

Over 300,000 reports flooded Downdetector as users scrambled to figure out what was happening. Spoiler: it wasn't just them.

The outage was widespread, affecting core functionality across the platform. Whether you were trying to browse, watch Shorts, or just land on the homepage, YouTube wasn't cooperating.

No word yet on what caused the meltdown or exactly when full service was restored. But when a platform that basically never goes down suddenly does, 300K frustrated users lighting up Downdetector tells the story pretty clearly.