New Delhi, Feb. 18 -- YouTube suffered a widespread global outage on Wednesday (18 February) early morning and Tuesday (17 February) night , leaving users across several countries - including India and the United States - unable to load videos or access key features on the platform.

The disruption triggered a surge in complaints, with hundreds of thousands reporting problems ranging from blank homepages to failures in video playback and access to linked services such as YouTube Music and YouTube Kids.

Google later said the issue was caused by a malfunction in YouTube's recommendations system, which stopped videos from appearing across multiple parts of the service.

"An issue with our recommendations system prevented videos from appeari...