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Photo courtesy of Yonhap News |
[Alpha Biz= Paul Lee] An outage on YouTube disrupted service for about an hour on Tuesday morning, inconveniencing users on the final day of South Korea’s Lunar New Year holiday.
From around 10:00 a.m. local time, users accessing YouTube via its app or website were met with error messages stating that “something went wrong,” with video content failing to load. Normal access to the home screen gradually resumed at about 11:10 a.m.
Google said the issue stemmed from a problem in YouTube’s recommendation system, which prevented videos from appearing across platforms including the YouTube homepage, mobile apps, YouTube Music and YouTube Kids. “The homepage has been restored, and work is ongoing to achieve a full resolution,” the company said. South Korea’s Ministry of Science and ICT said it received confirmation from YouTube at around 11:40 a.m. that services had been fully restored.
YouTube reportedly told authorities that a “data indexing” error occurred on the home screen during a service update. Data indexing—organizing location information for data in advance—is a core component of YouTube’s recommendation function. Accordingly, the disruption was concentrated on main pages driven by recommendation algorithms. By contrast, search functions, playback based on viewing history, and videos accessed via external links were largely unaffected.
According to Downdetector, more than 300,000 outage reports were logged in the United States. Media outlets including Reuters reported that users in the United States, Canada, India, Australia, the United Kingdom and Mexico also experienced service issues.
The outage triggered widespread complaints in South Korea, where many users were streaming videos or listening to YouTube Music while traveling during the holiday. On X, Korean-language trending searches included terms such as “YouTube Music” and “YouTube server.”
YouTube experienced a temporary disruption in November last year due to issues at content delivery network provider Cloudflare. On Tuesday, Cloudflare also said it had encountered problems in issuing certificates for Google Trust Services, though it has not been confirmed whether that issue was linked to the YouTube homepage outage.
Meanwhile, the Ministry of Science and ICT said it plans to investigate whether Google violated obligations under South Korea’s telecommunications disaster management framework. Under the government’s “2026 Basic Plan for Telecommunications Disaster Management,” established in December, value-added service providers such as Google are required to report service outages lasting longer than 30 minutes. Google reportedly notified the ministry of the incident at around 10:30 a.m.
Alphabiz Reporter Paul Lee(hoondork1977@alphabiz.co.kr)
