YouTube was back up and running on Friday after a brief but widespread outage that left thousands of users worldwide unable to access the popular video platform.
According to the outage-tracking website Downdetector.com, the problems peaked at nearly 10,800 user reports. The number of reports quickly dropped, however, to about 200 just a few hours later. The outage was global, with a large number of reports coming from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada.
YouTube has not yet commented on the cause of the outage, but the quick restoration of service suggests it was likely a temporary technical glitch. While the number of user reports on Downdetector is not an exact count of how many people were affected, the thousands of reports from multiple countries make it clear that the problem was widespread.
For a short time on Friday, the world’s most popular video site went dark for many, a brief but stark reminder of how much we rely on these massive digital platforms.
