YouTube Outage

YouTube Outage

So you tube went down for a whole couple of hours last night! Conspiracy theorists were on it! Deep state! Solar flares! Something big is about to be shifted! OMG!

Look, folks.

A solar flare is not going to affect ONE website or their servers only. That’s not how they work.

Deep state? Not EVEN going there. lmao.

This administration? Doubt it. Too busy dealing with their other scandals. Plus, they’ve pared down so far that it’s unlikely they have anyone left to do such a thing.

Fact: servers go down. Does your own computer seem to crash for no apparent reason pissing you off royally in the process? This is normal. Does it lock up now and then? Need a reboot because of it? So do servers.

Servers are NO different than what you’re sitting in front of, except the quality is likely better and more powerful. Every now and then do you get a message that says chkdsk and then it runs a check? Guess what, bunky. So do servers. How long the test might take depends on how big the hard drive is.

Fact: routers go down. Your connection might have to try and get thru a downed router and can’t. That will make it look like the site is down. You simply can’t get to the site.

Fact: connections go down. Have you ever surfed the web and right in the middle of it your internet connection shuts down?

I haven’t seen anything as to why YouTube went down but let me give you a scenario of how it can happen. Now, I don’t know what YouTube’s set up is, I’m guessing here.

But let’s assume for simplicity sake that YouTube houses it’s servers in one building, where all the free stuff is. Anything paid is hosted in another data center located elsewhere. The main YouTube page is hosted in yet a third data center. This is the gateway to all other services.

Now. Picture yourself sitting at home. You have two computers, a laptop and a cell phone. Your house or apartment is your “data center” – it houses your computers, laptop and cellphone.

The computers and laptop are wired into the walls, and you have an ISP for tv/internet service in a happy little bundle. Your cell phone uses another separate provider for service.

You’re relaxing browsing the web, watching tv when suddenly, your power goes out. Oops. No computers, laptop. Your “data center” is down. BUT the cell phone works, you can browse on that. This is because it uses another provider and switches your wifi if it can’t use your home network/data center wifi.

This may be what happened at YouTube. A simple explanation of what could have happened. I don’t know for sure, I don’t work there.

Another scenario: Updates

When we update our computers at home, we do them one at a time, as a rule. I could update them all at once over the network if I chose to do so, but I don’t (mainly because I don’t want to have to deal with the other computers if there ARE issues updating.) There is that option if I wanted to use it.

Big companies like YouTube don’t update their servers one at a time. They have people that write scripts that can roll out updates all at once. In general, they’re tested before hand to weed out bugs. But just because something might work flawlessly during testing, doesn’t mean it can’t mess up on rollout.

One of the error messages was a 500 internal error. That usually means it’s a permissions problem. That would mean you have to find where the permissions were set wrong and fix them. That can take time. Any fix can take time.

Bottom line: technology isn’t perfect. It breaks. It doesn’t mean something dark is happening. It means something broke. This YouTube outage also speaks to why you should always have backups of your videos locally. Just in case. Just because it’s never gone down doesn’t mean it won’t, kwim?