YouTube Suffers Unplanned Outage

Posted on August 15, 2006

Reuters reports that YouTube.com has suffered an unplanned six hour outage after a database-related issue. The popular video sharing site recently climbed into the comScore Media Metrix Top 50 -- debuting at number 40.

We are experiencing a temporary site outage due to a database-related issue," Supan confirmed in an e-mail to Reuters. "The site has been down since 7:30am (California time/ 14:30 GMT) today and our engineering team expect it to be up and running in the next few hours."
"To clarify and ensure accuracy, the site is not down for maintenance, the team put up that page mistakenly (it is an old page). "This was an unplanned outage," Supan said.
Around 1:30 p.m. PDT (20:30 GMT) on Tuesday, public access to the YouTube site was restored.

Blog the Internet asks is this really that bad? The blogger at Blog the Internet writes, "Wow thats BAD!" But come on is it really all that bad? Don't get me wrong... I get pissed too when my server is down... but, lets really think about this: When was the last time your electricity went out? Some more than others but for me, my electric has gone out over 10 times in the last year. Each time has lasted longer than 3 hours.

MySpace recently suffered downtime for a power outage but that was because of the heat wave. This was a database issue that brought down YouTube.com. Apparently, it was the company's first unplanned outage. Before admitting the outage was unplanned YouTube.com ran a maintenance graphic. The message said, "We're currently putting out some new features, sweeping out the cobwebs and zapping a few gremlins. We'll be back later. In the meantime, please enjoy a layman's explanation of our website."

Hopefully, YouTube.com has a handle on its gremlins because they do have a large number of competitors in the video sharing space that would love to steal away customers. YouTube will probably be back up before most people even notice it was down.