Is YouTube Down? Thousands of People Reporting Errors

Hundreds of thousands of people are reporting issues with YouTube on Tuesday night, May 18, after reporting issues earlier in the day also. Many users are reporting seeing a 429 error, problems with YouTube TV, the app, or they simply aren’t able to load YouTube at all. Other users are receiving messages about videos not being available in the selected quality. YouTube acknowledged on Twitter that they are working on the issue and later reported the issue was fixed.

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YouTube Is Down or Crashing for Many People

YouTube issues are affecting a number of people right now across the country, according to Down Detector. You can see that late on Tuesday night, a sudden spark in outage reports was shared by thousands of users.

Down Detector’s live outage map shows the issues primarily affecting the United States, especially on the West coast, but errors are being reported throughout the country

Google Trends indicated that one of the main errors people are noticing is an Error 429, along with a problem with YouTube not loading at all.

Other people are reporting getting messages such as: “This video isn’t available at the selected quality. Try again later.”

Google Cloud Platform’s status page currently is not noting any issues. In the past, this is sometimes a source for determining what is causing a YouTube outage, but right now it is indicating everything is fine, as of 11:44 p.m. Eastern.

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YouTube Acknowledged on Twitter That They’re Working on the Issues

YouTube has acknowledged having issues off and on throughout the day. Around 11:458 p.m. Eastern, they said they were working on issues with YouTube TV.

Team YouTube replied to one user who said they couldn’t watch “The Voice” without buffering: “Sorry to hear about the trouble – we’ve seen similar reports about YouTube TV not working and currently looking into it, will follow up once we have an update.”

They told another user an hour regarding problems with YouTubeTV: “Sorry for the trouble – teams are aware, and we’re working on a fix.”

Team YouTube also shared a general tweet about the issue, writing: “We’re seeing reports around difficulties accessing YouTube services within the last hour. We can confirm that this is now fixed and you should be able to access our service without any issues. Thanks for your reports and do let us know if you’re still facing any problems!”

Team YouTube also tweeted about the issue several hours before it cropped up again. They wrote: “If you were having issues uploading or watching videos on YouTube (including live streams) in the last ~45 mins – this issue has been fixed. Note: if your video is processing, it should complete now – otherwise you may need to reupload. Thanks for all of your reports!”

So many people were having issues that #YouTubeDOWN is trending on Twitter as more and more people encounter the problem.

Of course, memes and jokes had to be shared.

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