Photo Credit: Rachit Tank
Is YouTube down right now? Yesterday the world’s largest video site experienced a massive crash. Here’s what happened.
During the YouTube outage yesterday, many people reported being unable to watch videos or log in. YouTube confirmed a problem with its servers at around 7:23 EST.
“If you’re having trouble watching videos on YouTube right now, you’re not alone – our team is aware of the issue and working on a fix. We’ll follow up here with any updates,” the official YouTube account tweeted. The issue impacted several services across the YouTube offering, including YouTube TV and purchased TV and movies.
The YouTube outage was confusing because the site itself appeared to load just fine. But videos would not play, with an unspecified “error occurred” warning. This outage led to millions of searches for is YouTube down? It’s unclear when the site is working, but videos just don’t load.
At around 9:13 EST, YouTube finally gave the all-clear – after two hours, YouTube is no longer down right now.
While the outage only lasted for about two hours, it left many people feeling rattled. On the mobile app, the videos that weren’t loading didn’t really make it clear why. Websites that track whether or not a site is online or not saw a massive traffic spike during the event.
DownDetector saw a tremendous number of user reports of people reporting YouTube outages. In fact, these sites are often the best way to verify if YouTube is down for everyone or just you. At the height of the YouTube outage, DownDetector reported more than 280,000 new outage reports.
So far, YouTube has not clarified what caused the outage this time.
The last time a widespread outage like this happened, the Pakistan government was involved. In 2008, the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority ordered 70 internet providers to block YouTube. The restriction was only supposed to cover Pakistan.
But PTI implemented the block by redirecting YouTube traffic to YouTube IP addresses. That erroneously advertised the Pakistan route as the fastest connection to YouTube. Worldwide traffic to YouTube throughout much of Asia was blocked because of this routing misconfiguration.
There was also a massive YouTube outage in 2018 that YouTube didn’t explain. That outage affected YouTube, YouTube TV, and YouTube Music, preventing paying customers from accessing their services. Imagine paying for all of those services, and they all go down at the same time. You might as well not even have an internet connection at that point.