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.

About The Author

Danny Sullivan

Danny Sullivan was a journalist and analyst who covered the digital and search marketing space from 1996 through 2017. He was also a cofounder of Third Door Media, which publishes Search Engine Land, Marketing Land, MarTech Today and produces the SMX: Search Marketing Expo and MarTech events. He retired from journalism and Third Door Media in June 2017. You can learn more about him on his personal site & blog He can also be found on Facebook and Twitter.