YouTube Goes Down For Millions Worldwide, No Cause Revealed — YouTube TV Service Also Out During NBA Opener
The video streaming service YouTube, ranked by Alexa as the second most heavily trafficked online site in the world, suddenly went down on Tuesday night, according to media and Twitter reports.
At about 9:40 p.m. United States Eastern Daylight Time, the Team YouTube Twitter account posted a statement, but revealing no cause for the massive outage.
UPDATE: As of about 10:45 p.m. Eastern, YouTube service appeared to be restored in at least some regions, though outages persisted in many areas.
“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,” the Twitter posting stated.
Streaming functions on YouTube TV, a subscription-based “cord cutting” service that offers a package of popular cable channels including several carrying live sports events, also went down as viewers were watching the National Basketball Association opening night game between the Boston Celtics and Philadelphia 76ers — as well as the Major League Baseball playoff game between the Milwaukee Brewers and Los Angeles Dodgers.
The site Down Detector, which tracks outages of popular online services including YouTube as well as social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook, posted an outage map showing YouTube service failures throughout North and South America, most of Europe and parts of northern India.
YouTube screens in the affected regions showed a message similar to the one below.
Ok now this is a problem @YouTube pic.twitter.com/mA7bWnHxsh
— Pierre (@PierreColaco) October 17, 2018
YouTube was founded in 2005 by three employees of the online payments site PayPal, Jawed Karim, Steve Chen, and Chad Hurley, and was purchased by Google about a year later for $1.65 billion, according to a history of the video streaming service by the tech news site EndGadget.
Major outages of YouTube service have been rare, but the first occurred in 2008 when, according to ABC News, the government of Pakistan attempted to block access to the site due to what it said were anti-Islamic videos streaming on YouTube. But due to a technical error, not only was access to YouTube cut off within Pakistan, but in about 67 percent of the world as well.
Another YouTube outage took place in 2016, which the company attributed to a “routine engineering push,” according to TechCrunch. And in June of this year, YouTube service went out briefly for reasons that were unclear — but appeared to be resolved within an hour, according to a report by 9 to 5 Google.
YouTube now boasts a staggering 1.8 billion logged-in users every month, according to a report by Business Insider.
