"If you're having trouble accessing YouTube right now, you're not alone -- our teams are looking into this," the company said on X, linking to a support page.

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 back, but we're still working on a full fix," it said.

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.