YouTube seems to be having issues loading videos right now. Several Verge staffers are having trouble watching videos, and YouTube has confirmed that something is going on:
If you’re having trouble watching videos on YouTube right now, you’re not alone – our team is aware of the issue and working on a fix. We’ll follow up here with any updates.
— TeamYouTube (@TeamYouTube) November 12, 2020
The issue appears to affect other services that use the YouTube infrastructure too, including YouTube TV and the movies and TV shows you’d purchase through Google TV (formerly known as Google Play Movies & TV). We couldn’t load them.
In our testing so far, the YouTube website seems to load just fine, but videos themselves will continuously show the loading wheel. One Verge staffer got a video to load after about a minute.
DownDetector is also showing a truly tremendous number of user reports of problems with YouTube, indicating the problem is widespread — as I write this, the DownDetector graph is spiking at more than 256,000 user reports in less than an hour. Numerous users on Twitter are reporting that YouTube isn’t working for them, either, and searches are spiking for “is YouTube down.”
YouTube didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment.
