Recommendations System Glitch Blamed for Massive Disruption

YouTube experienced a widespread global outage on Tuesday evening, Feb. 17, 2026, that left millions of users unable to load videos, access the homepage or use related services like YouTube Music and YouTube Kids, with the company attributing the issue to a problem in its recommendations algorithm.

The disruption began around 7:45-8:00 p.m. ET (00:45-01:00 GMT on Feb. 18), with outage tracker Downdetector recording a peak of more than 320,000 user reports in the United States alone and tens of thousands more internationally, including spikes in the United Kingdom, India and other regions. Complaints centered on blank homepages, failure to play videos, app freezes, login issues and error messages like “Something went wrong.”

YouTube’s official TeamYouTube account on X (formerly Twitter) acknowledged the problem shortly after reports surged, stating engineers were investigating. By approximately 9:00 p.m. ET, the company provided more detail on its support page and social channels: “An issue with our recommendations system prevented videos from appearing across surfaces on YouTube (including the homepage, the YouTube app, YouTube Music and YouTube Kids). The homepage is back, but we’re still working on a full fix.”

The recommendations engine — the AI-driven system that suggests personalized videos based on viewing history, search behavior and engagement — malfunctioned, causing cascading failures across the platform’s front-end interfaces. This prevented content from loading on key surfaces, rendering the service effectively unusable for many despite backend servers remaining operational.

The outage lasted roughly 90-120 minutes in most regions, with partial restoration (homepage functionality returning) by around 9:30-10:00 p.m. ET. YouTube issued a final update around 10:15 p.m. ET: “The issue with our recommendations system has been resolved and all of our platforms (YouTube.com, the YouTube app, YouTube Music, Kids, and TV) are back to normal! We really appreciate you bearing with us while we sorted this out.”

No widespread reports of the issue persisted into Wednesday, Feb. 18, or Thursday morning, though isolated lingering complaints appeared in some time zones. YouTube did not disclose whether the glitch stemmed from a configuration error, software update deployment failure or other technical root cause, but sources familiar with Google’s operations suggested an incorrect configuration may have been applied too broadly across server clusters in multiple regions, amplifying the impact.

The incident affected YouTube TV subscribers as well, with thousands reporting streaming interruptions and channel access problems. No data loss, security breaches or permanent damage to user accounts were reported.

This marks one of the more significant YouTube outages in recent years, following smaller disruptions in 2025 tied to similar algorithmic tweaks or regional network issues. Google’s vast infrastructure typically provides redundancy, but front-end recommendation dependencies created a single point of failure in this case.

Users in high-traffic areas like the U.S. West Coast (San Francisco, Los Angeles) and India reported the heaviest impacts, consistent with time-zone peaks in evening viewing. Social media erupted with memes and frustration, with many turning to alternatives like TikTok or Twitch during the downtime.

YouTube, owned by Google (Alphabet Inc.), serves more than 2.5 billion monthly logged-in users and remains the dominant video platform globally. The company emphasized rapid resolution and thanked users for patience, but the event renewed discussions about over-reliance on complex AI recommendation systems and the need for better failover mechanisms.

No compensation or official apologies were announced, though YouTube’s history includes goodwill gestures like ad credits for prolonged creator outages. As services stabilized, normal viewing resumed without apparent long-term effects.