As an avid YouTube watcher, one of the most frustrating things is watching a video—only for it to stop after it reaches a certain load point. Or even worse, you get that error message which is the YouTube equivalent of The Price is Right losing horn. This experience can come from a variety of places including the device, the internet connection, and YouTube itself.
Regarding YouTube, the publisher might be doing maintenance, experiencing a DDOS attack, and/or more. Think about it this way, according to Statista, in 2021, the site had 2.5 billion active users a month. That number is roughly one-third of the human population. This is to say, that sometimes the servers have hiccups (planned or otherwise) so the occasional outage on Alphabet’s (YouTube’s owner) end is inevitable. Let’s get into how to best diagnose if this is a server issue.
Before going down our options, try checking on another device, restarting, and seeing if it’s only YouTube that’s weird. If you’re on Wi-Fi (especially public) or a VPN turn those off.
Option 1—Ask The Audience
Let’s be real, many of us just open a massive social media site like Twitter before beep bopping through server-status sites. When any major streaming or social media site goes down, as long as it’s not Twitter, it will trend on Twitter. Once there, you can check YouTube’s main handles to see if they tweeted about it. These handles include @YouTube and @TeamYouTube. Other major handles like @YouTubeCreators, @YouTubeGaming, and the very much not official @IsYouTubeDown3. Another very online bunch includes Redditors— so also take a gander at fan-run board r/youtube.
Just because none of these sources have reported any outages doesn’t mean that you’re in the clear. It could just mean no one has tweeted about it yet. They, like you, are just looking, so maybe refresh a few times and give it a minute. (Speaking of a refresh, I hope you tried that on YouTube before Googling your way to this article.)
Option 2—Check the Server
The other more direct version is to go check if the server is up still. Common places to check include Is It Down Right Now?, Down Detector, and Down For Everyone or Just Me. The last one mentioned doesn’t show charts or anything, it’s just a simple red or green. I gave you three because your browser might not like one or another. If everything above still says YouTube is a-okay, then it’s likely you are the issue or have an internet provider issue.
(image: Disney)
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