SAN FRANCISCO, 16 October (HS): YouTube experienced a major, widespread outage on Wednesday evening, affecting hundreds of thousands of users across the United States and other parts of the world. The disruption impacted the main YouTube platform as well as related services including YouTube Music and YouTube TV.

According to the outage-tracking website Downdetector, more than 320,000 users in the US had reported issues by Wednesday evening. Users reported being unable to play videos, instead encountering error messages such as An error occurred. Please try again later or Something went wrong.

While users could still browse the site and search for content, video playback was disabled. Similar problems were reported by users in Europe, Asia, and Latin America.At 8 p.m. Eastern Time, the company officially acknowledged the problem in a social media post.

We’re aware that some of you are experiencing issues watching videos on YouTube right now, the statement read. We’re investigating the issue… Really appreciate your patience. Google, YouTube's parent company, did not immediately provide further details on the cause of the disruption.

The outage led to speculation on social media, including an unconfirmed claim from a hacker group that it had launched a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack, though this has not been verified. As of late Wednesday, the root cause of the widespread service failure remained unclear.

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Hindusthan Samachar / Jun Sarkar