YouTube Outage (Feb 17, 2026). What Happened?

On February 17, 2026, YouTube went down for users worldwide. Starting around 8:00 PM ET, the platform's homepage, Shorts feed, sign-in system, smart TV apps, YouTube Music, and YouTube Kids all stopped working. Over 21,000 reports were logged on IsDown alone. The error message was the same everywhere: "Something went wrong."

For consumer users, it was an inconvenience. For businesses that depend on YouTube — content teams, advertisers, media companies, live streamers — it was a blind spot. Most had no idea YouTube was down until they saw it themselves or found reports on social media.

Here's what happened, what broke, and how teams can avoid being caught off guard next time.

Timeline of the YouTube Outage

IsDown detected the outage at 01:02 UTC on February 18 (8:02 PM ET on February 17) through a spike in crowdsourced user reports. Over 21,891 reports were logged in a matter of minutes.

YouTube's team confirmed the root cause on X and in a Google support thread: an issue with their recommendations system prevented videos from appearing across surfaces, including the homepage, the YouTube app, YouTube Music, and YouTube Kids. The homepage has since recovered, but a full fix is still in progress.

What Broke

YouTube confirmed the root cause: a failure in their recommendations system. This system powers the homepage feed, Shorts, suggested videos, and content discovery across all YouTube surfaces. When it went down, any page that depends on recommendations stopped loading.

Based on thousands of user reports, here's how the outage manifested:

Homepage and feeds: completely down. The homepage returned a "Something went wrong" error on mobile, desktop, and smart TV apps. Shorts was also broken. No content recommendations loaded.

YouTube Music and YouTube Kids: also affected. The recommendations failure cascaded beyond the main YouTube app into YouTube Music and YouTube Kids, confirming this was a backend infrastructure issue, not a frontend bug.

Sign-in system: broken across devices. Users were signed out of all accounts and couldn't sign back in. The sign-in flow would loop, accepting credentials and then immediately showing "Something went wrong" again. TV sign-in via yt.be/activation codes failed entirely.

Smart TV and streaming devices: hardest hit. YouTube apps on Roku, Fire TV, Xbox, Google TV, and smart TVs were non-functional. Many users reported their accounts disappeared from the TV app entirely.

What still worked. Direct video links and search continued working for some users. Saved playlists and subscription pages loaded intermittently. The core video playback and search infrastructure was intact. Only surfaces powered by the recommendations system were affected.

What Users Reported

The pattern was consistent across hundreds of reports:

"Something went wrong" everywhere. Nearly every user saw the same generic error message with no further detail. No error codes, no estimated recovery time.

Signed out on every device. Multiple users reported being signed out of all accounts simultaneously, on phones, TVs, and computers. Re-authentication attempts failed repeatedly.

TV apps hit hardest. Smart TV users had the worst experience. Many reported their YouTube accounts vanished from the TV app, and the QR code sign-in flow (yt.be/activation) would claim success but then fail immediately.

Global impact. Reports came from across the US (Colorado, Michigan, Ottawa), UK, Australia (Brisbane), and India. This was not a regional issue.

Here's a sample of what users experienced:

• "Both mobile and desktop versions of YouTube unable to load homepage/content recommendations"
• "YouTube continues to say something went wrong and will not load up for me or the rest of my family — 4 different accounts"
• "YouTube is nonfunctional across all my devices, displaying an error message stating that I am not connected to the internet while all other apps and browsers are working properly"
• "Home and Shorts is down. Searching works and playing videos from search works."
• "Was watching a video on YouTube Premium. YouTube sent me out to a generic login but my account will not show up. Both TV and Desktop affected."

YouTube Outage History

This isn't YouTube's first major outage. IsDown has tracked 12 YouTube incidents since January 2023:

Date	Incident	Duration
Feb 17, 2026	Recommendations system failure — homepage, feeds, YouTube Music, YouTube Kids, TV apps	Partially recovered
Dec 19, 2025	Service outage	35 minutes
Nov 11, 2025	Possible outage (user reports)	35 minutes
Nov 7, 2025	Possible outage (user reports)	~4 hours
Oct 15, 2025	Widespread video playback issues	~4 hours

When YouTube goes down, incidents typically resolve within 67 minutes. The February 17 outage was worse than average.

FAQ

Is YouTube down right now?

Check the IsDown YouTube status page for real-time status based on crowdsourced user reports.

Why does YouTube say "Something went wrong"?

The "Something went wrong" error is YouTube's generic message for server-side failures. During the February 17, 2026 outage, YouTube confirmed it was caused by a failure in their recommendations system, not by anything on your device or network.

How long was YouTube down on February 17, 2026?

The outage started around 8:00 PM ET. YouTube confirmed the homepage has recovered, but a full fix is still in progress. Smart TV and streaming device users were affected longest.

How often does YouTube go down?

IsDown has tracked 12 YouTube incidents since January 2023. Most are minor (30 to 60 minutes), but major outages like the February 17 event happen a few times per year. The median resolution time is 67 minutes.

How can I get alerted when YouTube goes down?

Use a status page aggregator like IsDown. Add YouTube to your monitoring dashboard and route alerts to Slack, PagerDuty, or email. You'll know about outages within minutes.