Getty
YouTube was crashed for what was likely slightly more than an hour, but felt like an eternity for many people. Although the site is still down in many regions, it is beginning to start working again for others, and Down Detector reports have decreased significantly. This outage is rare. YouTube rarely is down, and typically any problems are fixed quickly.
Here’s a look at some of the times that the site has crashed before, starting with the most recent examples and then going back in time chronologically.
In July 2018, YouTube TV went down briefly during the World Cup game between Croatia and England. That was the second in time in two months that the app had gone down during a high-profile live event. The previous time happened during the NBA Eastern Conference Finals. Users could only stream the World Cup during the outage if they authenticated their YouTube TV credentials in the Fox Sports Go mobile app, The Verge reported.
Hey everyone — sincere apologies for streaming issues with YouTube TV. The timing is horrible but we’re working to be up and running again ASAP!
In April 2018, YouTube channel pages all went down in one afternoon. This brought a 500 internal server error similar to what we’re seeing today. However, during that time, individual videos could still be watched. The error only affected main channel pages. This error, however, lasted a long time. It started around 3 p.m. Eastern and was resolved around 8 p.m. Eastern.
In June 2017, YouTube was down for many users, mostly in the United States’ East Coast but the problem later extended across the world to the West Coast, Mexico, UK, and Japan. It was unclear what caused this outage. This outage also brought about the “500 Internal Server Error Message,” like today’s. A week before that outage, another one happened in the UK and parts of Europe. The June 6 error was not fully explained.
In 2013, YouTube went down for 30 minutes with a very similar error that was never explained. Anyone attempting to use the website encountered the error, so it was extensive like today’s.
In February 2008, the entire site went down after a Pakistan ISP was ordered to censor YouTube to prevent Pakistanis from seeing a trailer to an anti-Islamic film. Pakistan Telecom changed the BGP entry for YouTube, and a bad address was accidentally cascaded around the net when the upstream providers passed the new route along without verifying it, Wired reported. At the time, Wired wondered if the outage would prompt network operators to adopt proposals to verify changes to the BGP system.
It’s unclear what has happened to cause YouTube to go down this time around. This appears to be a bit unusual, as YouTube typically resolves any issues very quickly.
This is a developing story.
READ NEXT: Top Facebook Alternatives After the Purge