YouTube was down — here's what happened

A 502 error took YouTube down in several countries

News
By last updated
YouTube open on a PC
(Image: © Shutterstock)

YouTube went through an outage affecting millions of users across the globe. With over 12,000 outage reports on Down Detector at its peak, users are sharing the 502 page error they are all seeing.

A 502 bug is typical when there's a problem with the servers, and users reported the US, Spain, Japan and more were affected. Other countries like the UK were unaffected and the app was all fine too. This impacted the website specifically.

Refresh

Looks like it (might) be over

Down detector

(Image credit: Down detector)

Outage reports have just taken a massive dive, and Tom's Guide staff are confirming YouTube loads again in the U.S.

Was this a broader Google thing?

Down detector

(Image credit: Down detector)

There's a chance this may be something more on Google's server side of things. There have been outage reports on the big G's side too, but nowhere near the same size as YouTube. So this could be a bit of a red herring — you see them often when it comes to people blaming the servers rather than the service.

A potential fix?

Down detector

(Image credit: Down detector)

A small but important turn in the tide of outage reports. This may be a blip!

What users are seeing

This is what a lot of the users in the U.S. are seeing when trying to enter YouTube or YouTube TV — a 502 server error. "Please try again in 30 seconds," the error message reads.

That's a big spike

Down detector

(Image credit: Down detector)

We're currently at 12,934 user outage reports at the time of writing. According to our StatusGator and user reports, this seems to be an outage impacting the website — the mobile app seems to be OK.

You must confirm your public display name before commenting

Please logout and then login again, you will then be prompted to enter your display name.