February 17, 2026
When the Algo Calls in Sick
It's not just you, YouTube is partially down in outage
YouTube’s homepage disappeared and the internet went feral—team “No Recs Day” vs “Where’s My Subs”
TLDR: YouTube’s homepage and recommendations glitched while direct links still played, and Google says a partial fix is live. Commenters split between celebrating a rare break from the algorithm and grilling the economics behind running YouTube at planet-scale—turning a brief outage into a debate about attention, ads, and infrastructure.
If your YouTube home looked like a ghost town, you weren’t alone—and the comments lit up like a Friday-night premiere. The outage hit the homepage and recommendations across the main app, Shorts, Kids, and Music. Google says it’s partially fixed now, with the home back, but a full fix for recommendations is still in the works. Direct links still played videos, and YouTube TV mostly cruised along, which only fueled the chaos.
The community reaction? Pure split-screen drama. One camp threw a party for “No Algorithm Day,” joking the recommendation engine took a sick day and calling the blank homepage “the calmest YouTube we’ve had in years.” Another camp panicked: no homepage, no Shorts, no subscription feed—“my entire TV is a loading screen.” Creators scrambled to post direct links to salvage views, while some users flexed their survival skills: “I’ve got RSS and bookmarks, I’m built for this.”
Over on Hacker News, the vibe turned armchair-engineer. A top thread pointed the spotlight on scale and costs—How many servers does YouTube run? How many petabytes is this beast? If ads are finite, who pays for infinite storage? Others rolled their eyes and begged for basics: “Forget the data center tour, just give me my subs back.” Meanwhile, memes flew: “We beat the algorithm,” “Back to 2007 YouTube,” and “Touch grass until the homepage returns.” It’s a platform outage turned culture war—with a punchline.
Key Points
- •YouTube experienced a widespread outage starting around 7:45pm ET, rapidly expanding by 8pm ET.
- •Core features like the homepage, subscription feed, and Shorts were inaccessible on web and mobile.
- •Google attributed the disruption to an issue with YouTube’s recommendations system.
- •A partial fix restored the homepage, but a full fix for recommendations-related issues is still pending.
- •YouTube TV remained accessible in tests; YouTube Music largely worked; direct web links/embeds continued to play.