For the first time since November 2013, Google-owned YouTube experienced a major global outage that caused video lovers from all over the world to panic.
During the time of the outage, users who visit YouTube would be greeted with blank screens, a 500 Internal Server Error message, or other error notifications.
The downtime, fortunately, only lasted for 15 minutes. The outage itself, however, was more surprising than the quick solution, as users view YouTube as one of the most reliable websites online. Many internet services have suffered from outages over the previous years, with previous big ones being Twitter back in January and Facebook in September of last year, when the social network went down for three times.
YouTube has maintained reliability, despite accounting for about 18 percent of the traffic on the internet, primarily due to its straightforward nature. While other online platforms have been adding more and more features, affecting stability and leading to downtimes, YouTube's basic premise of being an online destination to share and watch videos has largely remained the same over the years.
According to third-party services which track outage, YouTube's downtime did not affect all markets in a similar extent, which explains why there were some users that were still able to access the website while others were complaining about not being able to.
According to Down Detector, YouTube's outage started at 7:26 a.m. EDT on Wednesday, June 22, with thousands of reports coming in during the downtime's peak.
So what exactly caused the 15-minute downtime of YouTube? According to Google, the outage was not caused by hackers in some sort of attack against the video-sharing website. Instead, the downtime was due to routine engineering updates.
Shortly after YouTube went down, users on music streaming service Spotify also started experiencing issues. This is notable because the app moved from Amazon Web Services to Google's Cloud Platform in February, which is the same platform that powers its own services, including YouTube.
While Google is saying that the outage experienced by YouTube was only specific to the video sharing website, there could still be some form of connection between the YouTube downtime and the Spotify issues. Perhaps the engineering updates were being applied to Google's Cloud Platform?
Nevertheless, YouTube is now back up and running. The downtime will soon be forgotten, and everyone can now go back to watching videos of cute kittens, NBA Finals highlights and streaming video games.
