The shares of U.S. tech giant Alphabet (GOOGL) trended near the flat line during early trading on Thursday. This comes even as Alphabet-owned YouTube restored streaming on its platform after a major outage late Wednesday.
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The outage affected thousands of users of the platform scattered across the world, including the U.S., the UK, Canada, and Australia. YouTube confirmed the outage on Wednesday evening and later followed up with an additional update on X, noting that the issue has been fixed.
YouTube Returns Online
The service did not disclose the root cause of the outage, but it noted that users could continue to play videos on the main streaming platform as well as on its music and television apps. YouTube also did not disclose the number of users affected by the disruption.
However, data from Downdetector showed that in the U.S. alone, over 300,000 users were affected by the downtime during its peak on Wednesday evening. Yet, the true scale of the problem cannot be determined as data from the real-time outage monitoring platform is based on complaints filed by users.
YouTube Sees Outage amid Falling User Engagement
Meanwhile, YouTube’s latest outage comes amid a broader slowdown in user engagement on the platform. Analyst Andrew Boone from Citizens recently reported that global time spent on YouTube declined by 1.2% year-over-year — the first annual drop since the financial services firm began tracking the data.
Boone believes the slowdown could be due to rising competition from social media platforms TikTok and Instagram (META), both of which are attracting users with short-form video content. Moreover, YouTube also recently stated its intention to give banned content creators a second chance to return to its streaming platform.
Is Google a Good Buy Right Now?
Turning to Wall Street, Alphabet’s shares currently boast a Strong Buy consensus recommendation, as seen on TipRanks. This is based on 30 Buys and eight Holds assigned by 38 Wall Street analysts over the past three months.
However, the average GOOGL price target of $258.81 indicates a 3.10% growth potential from the current level.
