If an average person will experience around 4,040 Mondays in his lifetime, YouTube users can mark one Monday off that figure as the video sharing service went down briefly late Monday afternoon. The homepage of the Google-owned company showed a "500 Internal Server Error." Reports over the Internet said that aside from the desktop site, YouTube's Android and iOS apps, as well as the mobile site all went down. Embedded videos on websites were also unavailable.
Users of the third most popular website in the world saw a bit of comic relief on YouTube's error message while some found it rather unhelpful.
"Sorry, something went wrong. A team of highly trained monkeys has been dispatched to deal with this situation," stated the error message followed by a long code that consisted of random numbers and codes as part of the company's light take on the shutdown.
YouTube was down for about thirty minutes and users were able to access the service before 6:00 pm Monday.
"Some people encountered errors, or a slower than normal experience on YouTube today. We worked quickly to address the issue and fixed the problem. We're sorry for any inconvenience this caused," Google said in a statement.
According to official statistics, YouTube has more than a billion unique users who watch more than 6 billion hours of videos every month. With the growing popularity of tablets and smartphones, viewership on mobile devices are up by 25 percent reaching a billion views a day on the platform.