YouTube is Down - Why and What On Earth Happened?

October 18, 2018

Even if you didn't experience the outage yourself. You must have learned by now that YouTube went down for over 1 hour through a flood of reports and posts.

People were reporting that YouTube turned inaccessible from approximately 6 p.m to around 8 pm on Tuesday. At the very first, this outage may affect users mainly in United States and United Kingdom. However, it soon became a global outage.

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More than many people have posted such a problem that YouTube was down on iPhone, Android, Windows, Mac, and all kinds of devices. People failed to access any YouTube videos except a blank page that doesn't load or a 500 Internal Server Error.

YouTube has acknowledged the access problem in its official Tweet account (@TeamYoutube): Thanks for your reports about YouTube, YouTube TV and YouTube Music access issues. We're working on resolving this and will let you know once fixed. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and will keep you updated.

This is a really unusual incident to happen which also lasts for long. It took over 1 hour for the world's most first-rated tech team to fix the access issue.

Some celebrities also bring up their points of views to this outrage:
"Never seen YouTube down for 30+ minutes like this before," Marques Brownlee, a popular YouTube video producer, said on Twitter.
"how does youtube go down for an hour at this point -- that seems insane," tweeted New York Times tech reporter Mike Isaac.

At 8:00 p.m., the Team YouTube account tweets that "We're back! Thanks for all of your patience. If you continue to experience issues, please let us know." Since then, people around the world are about to visit this world's most popular video site again.

YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki also apologized but did not provide additional details for the outage: "YouTube is back," Wojcicki said in a tweet. "Sorry to everyone who was impacted. Thank you to the teams who resolved this."

However, now that the outage was fixed, YouTube nevertheless seems to be not going to bring a further explanation to the public. As for what caused the outage and what actually happened behind. We may only be able to conceive with some hints.

1: 500 Internal Server Error

Many users have reported that videos embedded in sites were showing this error message with a money, saying that "Sorry, something went wrong. A team of highly trained monkeys has been dispatched to deal with this situation. If you see them, send them this information as text (screenshots frighten them)."

The message doesn't tell much except YouTube describing their tech teams as highly trained monkeys in a humorous way. However, we know that Error starts with 5 is typically an error that is caused by the server of the website and nothing to do with audience's network, devices, or accounts. Therefore, we can be sure that one or more servers on YouTube possibly break down at that moment. As for which, we'll never know.

2: Takes Over One Hour

As the world's most famous tech company, Google must have tech teams of tech masters. This is insane that they also spent over 1 hour resolving the issue, though I prefer that they may waste most of the time locating the culprit of the outage. To some extent, the problem may be caused by an insignificant glitch. That's why take them so long to find it out and get it fixed.

3: No Data Loss

At least no reports has been received until now that any video is missing or lost. If you do, you may leave your comments below and tell us. As far as I'm concerned, this outage is probably not a big deal and that's why YouTube is not willing to speak it out.

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Published on October 17, 2018

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