YouTube under fire over allegedly delaying reporting of service disruption

A screen shows error in playin videos on YouTube, Thursday / Yonhap

YouTube is facing mounting criticism after allegedly delaying the reporting of a major service disruption that left millions of users unable to access content, failing to meet the Ministry of Science and ICT’s regulations.

The major video sharing platform experienced an outage on Thursday, which reportedly lasted for about an hour from approximately 8:17 a.m. to 9:10 a.m. Yet, Google Korea is said to have notified the government about YouTube’s outage at around 9:01 a.m.

Under current regulations, major broadcasting and telecommunications providers must notify the ICT ministry within ten minutes in cases where a service disruption lasts for more than thirty minutes.

Following the data center fire in Seongnam in 2022 that caused massive service disruptions, the ministry designated seven major platform operators, including Google, as key broadcasting and telecommunications providers subject to government disaster management oversight.

However, Google Korea reported the disruption 44 minutes after it began, missing the reporting window mandated under the regulation.

The YouTube service failure is believed to have been caused by an error during maintenance work on its spam prevention system, which was later resolved through a rollback.

During the outage, many users experienced black screens on both mobile and desktop devices and were unable to play videos on the platform. YouTube Music was also affected, with users reporting that they couldn’t stream songs or other audio content.

“(YouTube) has quickly resolved the issue, and service was restored around 9 a.m. on Thursday. We apologize for the inconvenience,” Google Korea wrote on its official blog.

The disruption wasn’t limited to Korea, as users around the world also reported problems accessing YouTube.

More than one million users in the United States reported trouble accessing YouTube in the past 24 hours, according to the monitoring platform Downdetector. Reports began to spike around 8 a.m. and peaked at approximately 9 a.m., exceeding 360,000 cases.

Similar disruptions were reported across Europe, India, Australia and other parts of the world.