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YouTube announces fix after global problems Wednesday

BERLIN, GERMANY - NOVEMBER 19: The Logo of video-sharing website YouTube is displayed on a smartphone on November 19, 2018 in Berlin, Germany. (Photo by Thomas Trutschel/Photothek via Getty Images)

(NEXSTAR) – YouTube announced Wednesday night that they had fixed an issue that caused playback problems for hundreds of thousands of U.S. and international users earlier in the evening.

“…And we’re back – we’re so sorry for the interruption. This is fixed across all devices & YouTube services, thanks for being patient with us,” TeamYouTube tweeted at 9:13 p.m. EST.


YouTube didn’t specify what caused the outage. Almost two hours earlier the company tweeted:

“If you’re having trouble watching videos on YouTube right now, you’re not alone – our team is aware of the issue and working on a fix.”

According to DownDetector, a site that monitors online outage reports, it appeared the problems started around 6:45 p.m. EST. The issue affected YouTube Music, YouTubeTV and YouTube.

As of 7:30 p.m. EST there were more than 280,000 reports of issues affecting YouTube, according to DownDetector.

An outage map showed a large number of complaints coming from the northeastern U.S., as well as Florida, parts of the South and California. Reports outside of the United States came from Colombia, Brazil, Argentina, Australia, Western Europe and Japan.

The playback error left some users with an endlessly spinning wheel as videos failed to load, while others reported getting an error message.