Problems at YouTube – Website Down
November 18, 2013 – Dotcom-Monitor worldwide monitoring network began detecting issues with Google’s YouTube video service since approximately 4:22 PM CST on Monday afternoon.
Monitoring trace route information from Dotcom-Monitor at the time of the YouTube error shows:
72.14.233.67 | 9 | 25 | 14.6666666666667 | 15 | Icmp error: 410 Request timeout.
YouTube is showing a custom 500 Internal Server Error. Many users have commented that at first glance the message appears to be the work of hackers. However, this message has been seen in years past and may be the parent company Google’s attempt to add humor to an otherwise serious issue.
The YouTube down message reads:
500 Internal Server Error
Sorry, something went wrong.
A team of highly trained monkeys has been dispatched to deal with this situation.
If you see them, show them this information:
9mveuLDvDAmkSNl_WwwiwdRd96CWp-E0c_JV4ZikwxqIFcj7mcRTTULAz6QY…
(jibberish code continues for 62 lines)
Dotcom-Monitor has a free suite of web performance test tools (available here) for tracking issues like the YouTube outage including free trace routes, webpage speed test, and server uptime checks. All of these tools conduct tests from multiple worldwide locations and are free to use to determine whether a website outage is local or worldwide.
Impact of YouTube Down
Even a small hiccup at YouTube can have a significant financial impact as YouTube is a major advertiser. YouTube notes on its website they have thousands of advertisers using TrueView in-stream and a million advertisers using Google ad platforms, the majority of which are small businesses.
The web information company Alexa currently ranks Google’s YouTube at the #3 trafficked website in the world. YouTube boasts more than 1 billion unique visitors each month, over 6 billion hours of video watched each month, and an average of 100 hours of video uploaded to YouTube each minute.
Popular community driven uptime website www.isitdownrightnow.com was unresponsive this afternoon, as a suspected flood of traffic attempted to verify YouTube down or uptime status.
Dotcom-Monitor has confirmed YouTube is receiving a 500 Internal Server Error, but the direct cause of the error is unknown. Dotcom-Monitor has setup a live dashboard to monitor YouTube, available to the public. To check the uptime of YouTube, follow this URL: https://www1.dotcom-monitor.com/reporting/Card/detail.aspx?uid=a6fb0804e1a54eb48e1a59abdc7fcbeb
