Video giant YouTube appears to be suffering a massive outage today, with users reporting widespread problems attempting to connect to the site. The cause is not yet clear, but reports indicate that viewers are experiencing a number of glitches including “500 Internal Server Error” messages (a generic HTTP status code), “Error while loading” notifications, and blank video frames while attempting to access both the website itself and mobile apps.
No, it’s not your internet connection. @YouTube is down. pic.twitter.com/mSWYpQXSXM
— Kyle Harris (@kylesaidthis) October 17, 2018
So strange.. Twitter was sending out super strange notifications today and now YouTube is down. HELP
— Justine Ezarik (@ijustine) October 17, 2018
I wonder if youtube is down? pic.twitter.com/cj0x3aze6X
— Ricky Dillon (@RickyPDillon) October 17, 2018
#YouTube down down pic.twitter.com/vOohjW48IZ
— Surésh (@suresh16sky) October 17, 2018
According to the website Down Detector, which says it “collects status reports from a series of sources”, the outage is global. Down Detector showed that users in Australia, North and South America, western Europe, parts of Russia, Japan, India, and southeast Asia were all affected by the downtime.
(Gizmodo reporters in the US were able to load the site, though virtually everything except the logo and static links to company pages was blanked out. Our reporters in Australia received “500 Internal Server Error” messages.)
Down Detector’s YouTube page showed that the spike in reported errors began shortly before 12:00PM AEDT.
The nature of the error has not yet been determined, and it could conceivably be anything. YouTube acknowledged it was aware of the errors and working on a fix on Twitter:
Thanks for your reports about YouTube, YouTube TV and YouTube Music access issues. We’re working on resolving this and will let you know once fixed. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and will keep you updated.
— Team YouTube (@TeamYouTube) October 17, 2018
One Twitter user, however, seems to have figured out a short-term fix:
YouTube’s down but that’s not stopping me from watching my minecraft videos. pic.twitter.com/qKVNZnoJ1B
— ????CyanSparks but he’s Sans???? (@nickycyansparks) October 17, 2018
Gizmodo has reached out to YouTube for clarification on what the heck happened, but have not heard back at time of writing.