On Tuesday evening, YouTube experienced a significant service disruption that affected users both in the United States and internationally. Reports began to surge around 7:50 p.m. ET, with many users facing blank homepages and error messages across various YouTube services, including YouTube Music, YouTube Kids, and YouTube TV. Major U.S. cities such as New York, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, and Chicago were particularly impacted, with significant spikes in outage reports recorded by third-party tracker Downdetector. At the peak of the outage, Downdetector tallied nearly 838,000 reports from the U.S and approximately 1.69 million worldwide, illustrating the scale of the incident. Users trying to access the YouTube platform frequently encountered a shell of the homepage without any videos, while mobile applications displayed an error screen stating, "Something went wrong." Users took to social media to express their frustration and seek updates, prompting Team YouTube to acknowledge the issue and reassure users that their teams were working on it. The trouble stemmed from a malfunction in YouTube’s recommendations system, which hindered videos from appearing across various platforms associated with YouTube. This system's failure led to a high level of user disruption during evening hours when many individuals typically engage with the platform for news, entertainment, and other content. Given that YouTube is a major ad-supported video platform, the outage had further implications, affecting content creators, advertisers, and even live events being broadcast through YouTube TV. After an hour of escalating issues, YouTube confirmed it was investigating the outage and directed affected users to their support thread for further updates. Eventually, service was restored, and the company informed users they were working towards a full fix, particularly addressing residual login problems affecting a small number of YouTube TV users. By the time the outage subsided, users reported improved access, though lingering issues were still addressed in the following hours as the situation stabilized.