YouTube Faces Global Outage: Users Flood X With Memes After Video Streaming Stops

Millions of users around the world faced issues accessing YouTube, YouTube Music, and YouTube TV on Wednesday evening due to a massive global outage. The disruption began around 7 PM ET, with users seeing messages like “Something went wrong” or “An error occurred. Please try again later.”

The outage quickly became one of the top global discussions online as frustrated users took to X (formerly Twitter) to confirm the issue — and, of course, to share hilarious memes about the situation.

What Happened

According to data from DownDetector, over 320,000 complaints were reported for YouTube, with another 5,000 and 4,000 for YouTube Music and YouTube TV respectively. Major U.S. cities like New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, and Washington D.C. saw the highest disruption levels.

While Google has yet to specify the cause, TeamYouTube posted on X:

“If you’re not able to play videos on YouTube right now — we’re on it! Thanks for your patience.”

Offline downloads on YouTube Music reportedly continued to work despite the streaming failure.

Internet Reacts With Humor

Social media users responded with creativity and laughter. One user shared a GIF captioned, “YouTube users running to X to see if their YT is down too,” while another joked, “YouTube played the 30-second unskippable ad, but not the video.”

Another popular meme showed Friends character Joey looking shocked, captioned: “People coming to X to realize YouTube is down — it’s not their WiFi.”

Many expressed frustration and disbelief, with one post summing up the collective sentiment:

“You don’t realize how much you rely on YouTube until it’s not working.”

Despite the outage, users found humor in the chaos, proving that even when the internet breaks — the meme-makers never rest.