YouTube, Google and other platforms hit by major global outage
Photo: Outage peaked at around 3:30 a.m. across many services (Getty Images)
On the night of February 18, hundreds of thousands of users worldwide reported service disruptions affecting Google, YouTube, Cloudflare, and many other platforms, according to the outage tracking platform Downdetector.
According to the service, overnight the number of user complaints exceeded 500,000. The disruptions were global and were recorded in multiple countries worldwide.
In particular, users reported they could not access the Google search engine, the Gmail mail service, the YouTube video hosting platform, and other services.
Users also reported problems with hyperscalers, including Amazon Web Services and Cloudflare, which could have affected thousands of websites and applications that rely on these services.
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Massive outage in the operation of popular services
Based on the pattern of complaints, the outages lasted approximately 3–4 hours, with the peak of reports around 3:30 a.m.
For example, during the peak period, over 320,000 complaints about YouTube disruptions were registered in the U.S. alone. Interruptions were also observed in India, the U.K., Australia, and Mexico.
Shortly after, the company announced that the problem affecting access to the video-sharing platform had been resolved.
During the outage, YouTube appeared blank for some users, and videos did not load in the YouTube, YouTube Music, and YouTube Kids apps. A few hours after the issue began, the number of complaints dropped to zero.
Other similar incidents
In November and December, the global provider Cloudflare experienced several large-scale outages.
The most recent case occurred early on December 5, causing mass complaints on social media from users unable to access multiple services and websites.
Earlier, on October 16, 2025, a major outage affected YouTube worldwide.
