Video-sharing site YouTube suffered a widespread outage late on Tuesday, with hundreds of thousands of users reporting issues from around the world.

"If you're having trouble accessing YouTube right now, you're not alone – our teams are looking into this," the company said on X, linking to a support page.

The help page later posted that "an issue with our recommendations system prevented videos from appearing across surfaces on YouTube [including the homepage, the YouTube app, YouTube Music and YouTube Kids]."

"The homepage is back, but we're still working on a full fix," it said.

Tracking website Down Detector reported over 300,000 reports of problems from its user base, though the reports seemed to be diminishing after a peak at 9am Hong Kong time on Wednesday.

During the worst of the outage, visitors to the website's homepage were greeted with an invitation to come back later.

Google-owned YouTube is the world's largest video-sharing platform, with over 2.5 billion users actively using the site each month. (AFP)


Edited by Tony Sabine