Tracking website Down Detector reported over 300,000 reports of problems from its user base, though the reports seemed to be diminishing after a peak at about 0100 GMT.

During the worst of the outage, visitors to the website’s homepage were greeted with an invitation to come back later.

Google-owned YouTube is the world’s largest video-sharing platform, with over 2.5 billion users actively using the site each month.

AFP