Hundreds of thousands of people have been left without access to YouTube after the world’s largest streaming site went down.
Just after midnight on Thursday, reports began to spike on outage tracker DownDetector that the platform wasn’t working – with videos apparently unable to load or play.
In the US alone, more than 260,000 people reported that the streaming platform had crashed.
In Britain, that number sat at almost 50,000.
UK users were split on the exact type of outage, with 58 per cent saying they suffered issues with videos loading.
A further 35 per cent listed the main issue as the app, with eight per cent pointing to the website more generally.
Just before the clocks struck 12 in the UK, just three users had flagged issues with the website.
But a quarter of an hour later, that number shot up past 30,000 – before almost doubling in the next 15 minutes.
In America, those numbers were far higher, shooting from 220,000 to 330,000 in a matter of minutes after 12.15am.
Reports appeared to have peaked at around 12.30am, though hundreds of thousands of users worldwide were still without access to the website at 1am.
As well as the principal YouTube website, the streamer’s other domains like YouTube Music, YouTubeTV and even Google itself saw huge surges in DownDetector reports.
As well as the principal YouTube website, the streamer’s other domains like YouTube Music, YouTubeTV and even Google itself saw huge surges in DownDetector reports
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DOWNDETECTOR
On social media, fury broke out at the prospect of losing out on the Google-owned site’s array of content – YouTube is the world’s second-most visited website, according to analysis by Semrush and Similarweb.
One commentator voiced their dismay within seconds, fuming: “YouTube down when I literally just sat down to eat dinner!”
Another even claimed the site, which made headlines just days ago after GB News smashed the two-million subscriber mark, may have been hacked, adding: “I’ve never seen this happen before.”
GB News has approached Google for comment regarding Thursday morning’s outage.
