If you went to YouTube on any of your devices before 8 p.m. ET, you might have noticed that the website's sidebar that lets you access your subscription feed and account library is missing. Not only that, the account menu, which let you switch to another account or configure your settings within the website, was not working at all.
Some users were also unable to cast videos to a smart TV or watch streams from a gaming console, according to The Verge.
The reason behind the issues is due to an outage that affected Youtube in such a way that while its main function is still working, its secondary functions, which consist of the sidebar and account menu, do not.
YouTube Outage Details
According to Google's notice on the issue, the outage affected not just the sidebar and account menu, it also confirmed that users were unable to cast videos to smart TVs or watch streams on a gaming console. The outage also affected other YouTube Studio features, and the website incorrectly displayed the "no internet connection" error message when watching videos.
Reuters also confirmed the outage using the outage tracking website Downdetector.com, which showed there were more than 10,000 incidents of people reporting the previously mentioned YouTube issues.
The website not only tracks outages but also collates reports from various sources, including user-submitted errors, on its platform.
YouTube posted a tweet on its official Twitter page at 4:30 PM ET notifying users that they were aware of the issue and were working on a fix to solve them.
Read More: PlayStation Experienced a 45-Minute Outage — Which Services Were Affected?
"Getting reports from around the [world] that some of you are having trouble with certain features across YouTube services (e.g. logging in, switching accounts & using the navigation bar) - we're aware & working on a fix," YouTube said in its tweet.
The Verge noticed that by the time YouTube posted the tweet, the number of user complaints became fewer and fewer.
YouTube later posted an update on Twitter at 7:50 PM ET saying that the issues were "all fixed," and that all users should be able to log in, switch between accounts, and use the account menu and navigation bar across all devices and services, which includes YouTube TV, YouTube Music, and YouTube Studio. Meanwhile, Google also updated its notice, which shared the same information as YouTube's tweet has.
Despite the fix and the updates, YouTube and Google didn't disclose what caused the outage to happen.
The issue only lasted a few hours, The Verge reported.
A Time When Zero (Briefly) Took Over The World
This incident isn't the first time YouTube went nuts. ZDNet reported that a simple "zero" value caused a 50-minute outage of all Google services, such as Google and YouTube globally in 2020. The outage was so bad it also affected Google Cloud Platform and the companies that use it for computing resources.
Google engineers said in their full incident report that the zero that caused the 2020 outage was generated by the legacy storage quota system Google uses to provision storage for its authentication system automatically.
"As part of an ongoing migration of the User ID Service to a new quota system, a change was made in October to register the User ID Service with the new quota system, but parts of the previous quota system were left in place which incorrectly reported the usage for the User ID Service as 0," Google's engineers said in its report.
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