If you haven’t been active on the interwebs recently, then you wouldn’t know that YouTube was down this evening. And for those who’ve been waiting for the latest video from their favorite vlogger, it would’ve been a long and painful wait.
With the advent increase in cyber attacks on your favorite websites, the first thought that crossed your mind would’ve surely been — Has YouTube been hacked or what?? We’re doomed!! This is the end of the world!!(or something along those lines!)
But there is nothing to worry, because the global 15-minute(or more, if you’re from a different geography) outage was the result of a routine engineering push. The issue has since then been resolved and YouTube is back online — just saying — if you wanna enjoy more silly cat videos.
Other more frequently used platform’s like Facebook, Twitter or Tumblr have experienced sudden outages from time to time, but not YouTube. The video streaming platform’s outage was a shocker for all, as it is Google’s one of those services that has not experienced any down time for a very very long time. Users who experienced the outage took to Twitter — as expected — to complain about the outage. The outcome of the outage was different in different locations. Some user were seeing ‘500 Internal Server Error’ or other errors, while others could open the homepage but not play any videos.
And the error page displayed a message saying that the ‘highly trained monkeys’ at the YouTube HQ are trying to find the solution for the problem. While third party down-time tracking apps like DownDector.com flagged the outage and received several reports during the peak down time.
There were also several reports saying that Spotify, which is also hosted on the Google Cloud Platform also experienced some glitches around the same time as YouTube went down. So, people started contemplating that there was some issue with the Google servers, but the problem actually was YouTube-specific. People close to the development(via TechCrunch) have confirmed the same and said that the issue is now fully resolved and YouTube is functioning well.
While it may be surprising a service that’s responsible for roughly 18% of Internet traffic would be so stable, that it got back online in just a couple of minutes.
