YouTube restores services after global outage affects users

YouTube said late Tuesday it had fixed a widespread outage that hit hundreds of thousands of users around the world.

Tracking website Downdetector said there were more than 300,000 reports of problems accessing the video-sharing site, though the reports seemed to be diminishing after a peak at about 0100 GMT.

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

YouTube was back up and running when AFP journalists accessed the site at 0400 GMT.

"The issue with our recommendations system has been resolved and all of our platforms (YouTube.com, the YouTube app, YouTube Music, Kids, and TV) are back to normal!" YouTube posted on a help page.

The platform said earlier 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)."

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