YouTube Crashes Worldwide

Google-owned video streaming giant YouTube crashed on Tuesday worldwide, marking one of the first times in recent history that the site has gone down.

Video streaming platform YouTube was down for over an hour this week, marking the first occasion in recent history that the website has crashed. Shortly after the site went down, the official Team YouTube Twitter account tweeted: “We’re working on resolving this and will let you know once fixed. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and will keep you updated.”

Thanks for your reports about YouTube, YouTube TV and YouTube Music access issues. We're working on resolving this and will let you know once fixed. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and will keep you updated.

— Team YouTube (@TeamYouTube) October 17, 2018

A short while later, the account tweeted that the website was back online and asked users with remaining issues to contact the site.

We're back! Thanks for all of your patience. If you continue to experience issues, please let us know. https://t.co/NVU5GP7Sy6

— Team YouTube (@TeamYouTube) October 17, 2018

Users across social media and Reddit reported that when they attempted to visit the YouTube site they were receiving a 500 Internal Server error and the following error page:

This sort of error would imply an error in the site’s programming, something which YouTube engineers appeared to fix within approximately an hour. YouTube CEO Susan Diane Wojcicki apologized for the error and thanked the YouTube team for their work to bring the site back online:

YouTube is back. Sorry to everyone who was impacted. Thank you to the teams who resolved this. https://t.co/703DvCgzE5

— Susan Wojcicki (@SusanWojcicki) October 17, 2018

YouTube has rarely seen many performance issues, the only other notable one being during the World Cup this summer when YouTube’s new service YouTube TV suffered some problem and an outage of channel pages in April. However, the site is now back up and fully operational, much to the joy of it’s approximately 1.3 billion users.