YouTube Is Down for Thousands of Users (What Happened?)

It’s not just you: YouTube is down for thousands of users right now. While any online service is bound to have a few technical issues, YouTube – which is the second most-visited website in the world, after Google – has spiked in the number of reported issues on the morning of November 11th, 2025, with a variety of problems being raised.

As per the website Downdetector, there were over 6,000 reported cases of YouTube not working properly or being down altogether for users at one point (at the time of writing, it’s dropped to a little under 5,000). These include videos simply not loading, problems with uploading content, or attempts at watching videos/shorts being extremely buggy when they do play, frequently stopping and starting. The number of reported cases going down suggests things are being fixed behind the scenes, so that’s at least one point of encouragement for would-be users, but it’s nonetheless caused understandable frustration and confusion.

What Happened & Why Was YouTube Down?

YouTube has not officially commented yet on the outage, but it’s not entirely uncommon. After all, with a website visited by over 100 million users every single day, there are bound to be some hiccups and brief outages, which could be caused by a variety of server issues. Still, that number is normally in the low hundreds, not the thousands, which makes this case rather more notable. Unfortunately, there’s no obvious fix for any individual user that they can perform, though thankfully it will be working fine for a lot of people (my own experience from today is that it’s perhaps a tad slow, but otherwise fine).

This isn’t the first recent report of YouTube issues affecting thousands of people, however. Last week, after the platform tightened up against ad-blockers, lots of users were reportedly unable to access the website, depending on which ad-blocker they had installed, as per Tom’s Guide. It’s unclear if this is the case again today, but given the reported issues are more around videos not playing/uploading or things being buggy, rather than being unable to access the homepage, it may not be the case. Nonetheless, it might be worth testing with an ad-blocker turned off, or trying a different browser, to see if that resolves the issue.