Popular video-sharing website YouTube is down, causing angst among online users.

The outage began shortly after 9am WST and hit users around the world.

When users tried to access YouTube videos, they encountered error messages, like the one below. In addition, visiting YouTube.com produced a blank screen with only the YouTube logo displayed. Attempts to visit individual channels on the website returned “500 Internal Server Error” messages.

On the YouTube mobile app, users saw the “Error loading / Tap to retry” error message when they attempted to play back videos.

YouTube’s search functions were still functioning -- however, the videos were not playable from the results screen.

YouTube says it is working on fixing the problem.

Many people did not take the outage well.