Is YouTube down in Australia and New Zealand? Video platform’s homepage goes dark for thousands globally

A sudden outage affecting YouTube left hundreds of thousands of users unable to watch videos, triggering widespread frustration across multiple countries. The disruption began Tuesday evening and quickly escalated into a global incident as users took to social media to report problems accessing the platform.

According to NBC Chicago, reports of issues began appearing around 6:50 pm CT, and within less than half an hour, the number of complaints surged dramatically.

By 7:18 pm CT, more than 355,000 users had reported issues, making it one of the most significant service disruptions of the year for the video-sharing platform.


The outage was tracked by Downdetector, a widely used monitoring service that collects real-time user reports of outages and service disruptions.

Typical problems reported included videos stopping mid-playback, the YouTube website or app failing to load or general service interruptions.

One Downdetector commenter said they were “in the middle of watching a video when suddenly it shut down.”

As reports surged, the hashtag #YouTubeDOWN began trending on X (formerly Twitter), highlighting the global scale of the disruption.

Social media platforms have also been flooded with posts about the YouTube outage, including a dedicated post on the subreddit r/youtube which has over 7,700 comments.

Although initial reports were concentrated in the United States, outages on major global platforms like YouTube typically spread internationally due to the platform’s centralised infrastructure.

At the time the report was published, Google, YouTube’s parent company, had not immediately responded to inquiries about the cause of the outage.