YouTube Goes Down

We don’t know why yet, but YouTube has gone down — the home page showing only an error page saying that “a team of highly trained monkeys” is looking at the situation.

Here’s what’s being shown:

YouTube went down around 5:30pm Eastern time. The services has been under fire recently for YouTube’s shift to using Google+ to power comments. A petition against this has recently topped 100,000 signatures.

Could this be some type of hacking attempt related to a protest? If so, there’s no particular message being left behind about that. So for now, it seems likely there’s some internal error — and the funny error page is one generated by Google itself.

We’re checking with Google and will post more, when we know.

Postscript: And it’s back at 5:45pm ET for some, so down for about 15 minutes.

Postscript 2: Google sent this statement at 6:11pm ET:

Some people encountered errors, or a slower than normal experience on YouTube today. We worked quickly to address the issue and fixed the problem. We’re sorry for any inconvenience this caused.