On December 14, 2020, YouTube and other Google services went down. For more than an hour, people could not use YouTube: in a PC browser it showed “Oops, something went wrong!”, and in the mobile app it showed “There was a problem with the server [503]”.
These outages were becoming a bit too frequent. At the time of writing the service is back and working. This was the latest update from the YouTube team on Twitter (now X):
We are aware that many of you are having issues accessing YouTube right now – our team is aware and looking into it. We'll update you here as soon as we have more news.
— TeamYouTube (@TeamYouTube) December 14, 2020
YouTube Problems in the Last 24 Hours
What Caused the Outage
Google later explained the cause. The problem was in Google’s authentication system, the part that signs you in. Because of an internal storage quota issue, the system could not confirm logins, so services that need you to be signed in returned errors. This affected YouTube, Gmail and other Google apps at the same time.
Google said the outage lasted about 45 minutes and that it was an internal technical fault, not a cyberattack. Once the fix was applied, the services came back to normal.
