India, Feb. 18 -- YouTube experienced a widespread global outage on Tuesday, disrupting access for users across multiple countries, including India and the United States, with hundreds of thousands reporting problems loading videos and using related services.

Early during the disruption, Google acknowledged the issue in a public statement posted by TeamYouTube, saying: "We're aware some of you are having issues accessing YouTube right now. Our teams are aware, and we'll provide updates as soon as we have them."

The help page later posted that "an issue with our recommendations system prevented videos from appearing across surfaces on YouTube (including the homepage, the YouTube app, YouTube Music and YouTube Kids)."

"The homepage is ba...