Google's paid streaming service has taken its knocks for lacking features, but it's generally a reliable way to listen to your music. However, YouTube Music experienced a major outage earlier today, and it affected most central parts of the app and website. The company quickly acknowledged the outage, stating that the Home tab was down for some users, but has since restored full functionality to the service.

When the website and app were still down, we found that most users experienced a near-total loss of usability. Playback would continue to work for the playlist you were last listening to (provided you had one queued up), but the Library and Explore tabs wouldn't load for most users in addition to the Home tab being broken, and features like casting, lyrics, and related music were not working as expected.

The company also acknowledged the problem on the YouTube Music Help Community, marking the issue as "Known" and stating that the service first went down at around 1:50 p.m. PST on January 24. It pointed out that playlists could still be accessed from the main YouTube website and confirmed that the YouTube Music team was working quickly to restore its app and site.

An update to the issue tracking page indicates that YouTube Music is now back up and running, and the problem is now marked as "Fixed." Our testing backs up these claims, so if you’re still experiencing issues, try force-closing the app and clearing cache before opening it again.

Thanks: Moshe and Hamzah

UPDATE: 2023/01/24 19:05 EST BY DALLAS THOMAS

YouTube Music update

YouTube Music reports the outage is now fixed.