YouTube: has video app gone down in UK, problem with server 429 error explained, why is Twitter not working?

The internet has reportedly been thrown into turmoil by a number of high-profile services suffering technical issues and being made unavailable for many users.

Thankfully, the digital stormy seas seem to have subsided for now, and the majority of the troubles seem to have taken place over night, when many Brits were asleep. But for net users in the US and other parts of the globe, it was a rough night for those surfing the web.

Instagram and Twitter were two of the biggest names to be rendered unusable by ghosts in the machine, before video platform YouTube was taken offline by similar gremlins.

Just before midnight on 9 February, users started reporting problems with the video platform hours after both social media giants also experienced issues.

By 11.57pm on Wednesday (8 February), Down Detector had recorded almost 18,000 reported outages for YouTube. By 12.12am, that figure had more than doubled to almost 48,000. According to reports, users were having trouble loading the YouTube home page.

Many users of YouTube’s mobile app reported being greeted by the message “There was a problem with the server [429].” Desktop users who had attempted to use the platform reported seeing a blank screen.

Is YouTube back online?

Just after 12.30am, Team YouTube tweeted an acknowledgement of the problem: “Hi, we’ve seen reports that YouTube homepage is down for some of you... we’re looking into it rn, really sorry if you’re experiencing this... we’ll follow up with more soon, thx for your patience.”

Much like many widely reported tech outages, the problems didn’t seem to affect everyone universally, and other users allegedly had no problems watching videos. Following the message, the number of users reporting disruptions started to decrease, but not before numerous angry YouTube viewers vented their annoyance on Twitter over yet another app downtime. Well, at least those who could actually access Twitter did...

Problems were also reported by Twitter and Instagram users on Wednesday, after a bizarre glitch that extended the former’s 280 character limit for certain users to 4,000. Hours later, thousands of users were complaining that the app was now not working at all.

YouTube has since acknowledged that its problems have been fixed, and the night of internet and social media chaos seems to have calmed for many users around the world. “The YouTube Homepage should be back for all of your video needs, very grateful for your patience & thanks for hanging in there,” it wrote.