[Update: Back online] It’s not just you, YouTube and other Google services are down

Kyle Bradshaw | Oct 16 2018 - 6:55 pm PT

Google’s services are ubiquitous enough that it’s pretty noteworthy when they go down. Tonight, it seems multiple services are suffering an outage, including YouTube, and a quick search on Twitter reveals that it’s a fairly widespread problem.

Update: After an agonizing two hours, YouTube servers and Play Store transactions are simultaneously beginning to recover. The two issues seem (in my opinion) likely to be related. Hopefully, Google will offer a postmortem explanation for the outage in the coming days.

According to downtime tracker DownDetector, most people who are seeing the YouTube outage are in eastern and western United States and the UK. The site is seeing a very notable spike in reports of the web’s most popular video hosting site being down.

Readers as far spread as Canada, India, Australia and Brazil are also reporting being affected.

There have been more than 2,000 reports of the site being down on DownDetector in the last hour, compared to an average of less than 10 per hour. And as shown below, many users are seeing the usual “500 Internal Server Error” message that often appears when there’s something wrong with YouTube.

“A team of highly trained monkeys has been dispatched to deal with this situation,” the site says.

Beyond this, it seems the Google Play Store is also suffering an issue when attempting to make a transaction. It’s not yet known whether the issue is with the Play Store or the Google Pay service.

Other services may also be affected, and we’re watching for related reports.

We're back! Thanks for all of your patience. If you continue to experience issues, please let us know. https://t.co/NVU5GP7Sy6

— TeamYouTube (@TeamYouTube) October 17, 2018

Thanks for your reports about YouTube, YouTube TV and YouTube Music access issues. We're working on resolving this and will let you know once fixed. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and will keep you updated.

— TeamYouTube (@TeamYouTube) October 17, 2018