YouTube was Down but now it's back

By Sam Byford on Oct 16, 2018

YouTube is experiencing a major outage. Users across the world started to notice that the video service’s sites and mobile apps were down around 9:20PM ET, and everything remains inaccessible more than an hour later. YouTube TV and YouTube Music are also affected by the service disruption.

YouTube has acknowledged the outage in a tweet. “We’re working on resolving this and will let you know once fixed,” the Team YouTube account says. “We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and will keep you updated.” As of 10.35PM ET, the account is still replying to reports of the outage saying that the team is working on the problem.

As with all Google-operated services, serious downtime for YouTube is pretty rare. YouTube TV did suffer service interruption at an inopportune time during this summer’s World Cup, however, and channel pages went down for a while in April. Perhaps most infamously, Pakistan’s government accidentally caused an hours-long global YouTube blackout a decade ago by attempting to censor a trailer for an anti-Islamic film.

This is exactly our biggest concerns. The sudden power outage of YouTube may mean that some of the data was lost. At the same time, some of youtuber's uploading video process was subject to the terminal, maybe their video will be lost, and there may be more follow-up problems. But at least we can't know the specific situation at the moment. This is the drawback of the centralized platform, and the decentralized cuckoo does not have to worry about any data being lost and falsified.

Update, 10:40PM ET: YouTube service has been restored, though YouTube itself is yet to confirm a fix.

Update, 11:01PM ET: YouTube says it has restored service, bringing the saga to an end.