Update: The outages have been resolved as of around 3:00 p.m. ET.
A Google spokesperson told TechCrunch that there was a surge in traffic beginning at around 10:25 a.m. ET, which correlated with an unrelated service disruption. Though the spokesperson didn’t specify further details, that timing lines up with a major outage at Meta, where users were unable to access Instagram, Facebook and Threads. The spokesperson said that a small number of users were impacted, and there is no evidence of cyberattacks.
Several social media websites are experiencing outages on Tuesday morning. YouTube confirmed that some users are having trouble loading videos on the platform; meanwhile, platforms like Discord and Meta’s Threads, Facebook and Instagram are down as well.
According to a post on Google’s support page, users may be experiencing an empty home page, error messages, spinning wheels while scrolling on Shorts and running out of videos to watch on Shorts’ infinite feed.
“Rest assured we’re working on a fix now!” the post says.
YouTube also shared an update on its X account, which links to the support page.
The root cause of these widespread outages remains unclear. Sometimes, several platforms go down at the same time if they’re using the same cloud computing services, like AWS. But AWS is not reporting any issues; plus, companies like Meta and Google are large enough to operate data centers independently of providers like AWS, making outages of this nature uncommon.