YouTube experienced a significant outage on October 16, affecting over 293,240 users in the U.S. while inquiries surfaced from Canada, Australia, and the UK. Despite generating $8.92 billion in Q1 2025 ad revenue, Alphabet revealed no impact on earnings or duration of the issue. Advertising technology firms see an opportunity to create tools that could automatically reallocate ad budgets during such downtimes, enhancing contingency plans for media buyers reliant on YouTube.