YouTube Down
downdetector.comWith the amount of attention around this outage, it feels like YouTube has become completely ubiquitous in modern society. I can't imagine a future in which YouTube just ceases to exist. The company has already become tied to the livelihoods of so many people, and has spawned too many significant subcultures.
It's a strange feeling to be alive just after all of the significant technology companies were created and started to gain traction. YouTube has only existed for fifteen years, but it might continue to exist for centuries. The demand that has arisen in people to watch videos online is probably not reversible so long as maintaining a video streaming service is still physically possible. If not YouTube, something else would probably fill in such a void if it ever appears, barring the Apocalypse.
It gives me a lot of conflicting feelings. Twenty years ago, few people would have known they wanted the unique content that YouTube offered that wasn't available at the time, like livestreamers or swathes of content about every single plane crash or minor video game mechanic that can be talked about. But now, thousands have become hooked on them. I can't remember the details, only that I've watched them at some point. I wonder where the time would have went if we were not enterprising enough to invent big data and portable streams and engagement metrics. And for me personally, I can say that I "like" a lot of content, but I'm reasonably certain that's the kind of thing some portion of drug addicts would say about their habits. Not much of it actually helps me.
The notion of media that "actually helps" you is itself just as constructed as YouTube. Interrogate where it comes from and what sort of cultural work it's doing. Does "help" mean that it makes you a better worker? Why doesn't YouTube help you, and is that a bad thing?
Second, the good old days of "before" we were enterprising enough to invent big data etc. is retroactively constituted, and not apparent until its demise. Before YouTube it was television and radio, magazines and books, and even writing itself. On the technology of writing, Plato said "They will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks."
These constructions create the appearance of the industry's indestructibility -- certain consequences (the before, the help, or the livelihoods or subcultures you mention) are taken to axiomatic or self-evident, creating a logical construction that is bulletproof in its circular vacuousness. YouTube will die, just as websites before it have died, and technologies before it have died. What comes next might be better or worse.
That is to say, just enjoy your videos if they make you happy.
So, I think there's one (or two) easily carved exceptions to your "YouTube doesn't actually help you" statement.
One, Veritasium. Content like this didn't (perhaps even couldn't) exist before YouTube. The science TV shows and even many books don't go into as much user-friendly depth as this does. You'd have to go to college and pay to get content even remotely close (and still, based on prior experience, not as good).
Two, any one of many How To DIY channels. They show you how to do things you're unlikely to find elsewhere. Where else will you find someone willing to tell you how to change your oil and filter on a [random year & model] car for free? How to wire up a light switch to code? How to clean your sink drain? Certainly not the paid professionals.
On that note, channels like AvE and Real Engineering come from two different ends of the spectrum in terms of production quality but have a similar feel in terms of how much I learn per minute of content.
There are also channels like the Sampson Boat Company that take a project that would've just ended up turning an old boat into scrap after a while into one of my favorite carpentry/woodworking things to watch, better even than old episodes of the Woodwright's shop or This Old House.
This Old House also has a great YouTube channel with excerpts for lots of home improvement tasks.
Note that much of this content is there in the form of "entertainment". Like Veritasium, extremely well made videos with the "feel smart for some minutes" format that others use too, like smartereveryday. It's just that, entertainment. It's not a public service trying to help you. It's not even you trying to help yourself (I don't mean specifically you).
> for free?
It's not really for free. People making these videos are getting paid.
> go to college
One thing I do appreciate is universities streaming their classes, on Youtube or other means. Of course, it's not that I will become an astrophysicist by just watching videos.
I think there is something to be said about connection to the real world economy and hard currency, and values that contents on the Internet offer are surprisingly lean on that front.
The value of the physical does not imply a lack of value in the digital.
The value of the digital equally does not imply a lack of value in the physical.
And, I will assert until I’m dead, the internet has done nothing but broaden my horizons - for the internet is full of quality information and entertainment, beyond what I could ever find in the physical world, if only because without a free or cheap publishing method the information and entertainment would not exist.
Some things are simply not possible with only a “physical economy,” because t physical economy is about things, not ideas.
I find some media to be actually helpful if it is instructive. I frequent YouTube for how-to videos all the time and there are tons of videos that have saved me time and money by making rookie mistakes that someone more experienced in a particular field mentions off-handedly in a video. It's great for software projects, electrical engineering projects (like Raspi and Arduino stuff), and a lot of other miscellaneous things where people with hands-on experience can share tons of wisdom in short video.
That said, there is also a lot of junk YouTube content, which feels similar to browsing Reddit, Facebook, or eating donuts for that matter... It's a guilty pleasure to watch some videos. Even the "cute" ones, like cat videos, or "funny" fail compilations, or impressive parkour videos. These can be entertaining on the surface, but I find they do the opposite of inspire me. They're temporarily exciting to watch, but overall do not any value to my life and in the big picture, I find them to be more of a distraction than anything. Some people have a balanced media diet and can consume it moderately. For me, it's too easy to spend several hours in any given week watching completely useless videos - especially with the ever growing mechanisms to try to keep your eyes glued to the screen (auto-play features, suggested playlists, etc).
I compare it to a type of drug use. Some people handle it well, others don't. Like most things, YMMV.
Edit: I also feel like with YouTube's insane growth over the past decade, there are way too many people trying to game the system. It leads to some very good content, but also a lot more junk content that just manages to add better keywords for searches, or a more attractive title/thumbnail to catch your eye (I'm sure many people are familiar...).
Thank you for responding. I think I was projecting myself too much when saying that YouTube doesn't help me. That depends on how I use YouTube, but I don't want to indict the entire platform because I happen to use it suboptimally. There are so many ways to use YouTube that didn't immediately pass my mind, like for DIY or sharing family videos. On the other hand there is a lot of other content that is easy to get into, but which I cannot apply to learning skills or about people. Just because some people might have issues being too distracted by media that is really easy to reach doesn't mean that people more disciplined can take advantage of the same media for their own benefit.
I was more meaning about being distracted. A lot of times it feels like browsing sites with a lot of updates is something I do when there is not immediately anything else to do. But that's an individual issue. If I am going to rectify that problem, then I need to ask what I would be doing instead, and do that, instead of falling back to whatever happens to be in reach. Sometimes I apply a rule of only using YouTube for X hours if I know exactly what I want to watch ahead of time, instead of using the recommendations to watch something I didn't necessarily know or care about but looks like an enticing rabbit hole to fall into from the presentation.
I do enjoy using YouTube as a platform, I just need better viewing habits.
The saddest thing about YouTube disappearing would be losing the vast trove of educational content that has amassed over the years. We live in a unique time in history when you can go online and learn how to do absolutely anything you want for free. I feel like the majority of people still hugely underestimate how valuable this is. Granted, there's a lot of junk to wade through. But the information is out there.
One more thing I was thinking about is that I don't think people are uploading things to YouTube just to have YouTube be declared as outdated in a few decades in preparation for the next form of media. The implicit expectation that most casual producers have is that the videos will remain on YouTube "forever," which really means some vague amount of time that doesn't have to be thought about in the short-term. This is a major difference from television because YouTube can be used for personal expression, major productions broadcast on television are archived by the studios because the finished product is not restrictively large in terms of data, and I don't think people would be happy if the millions of hours spent producing their independent content will be all for nothing in a few decades. To keep all of that content alive in the future, YouTube either needs to continue to exist or the content needs to be mass-migrated to the next form of media.
But what would that form of media be, and what would be the justification for creating an entirely new media platform to succeed YouTube? I find it difficult to imagine what it would look like at this point in time.
People made a big deal about archiving Usenet when everyone started moving away from it. If YouTube has to be archived I don't see how it can be completely accomplished without people who have used youtube-dl in the past gathering up whatever they happened to save before it went down. There's hundreds of millions of hours of video already on YouTube, and unlike Usenet archives only a few large entities have the money and infrastructure to warehouse the entirety of that data.
Saying that YouTube will pass on because media companies always pass on almost sounds as if YouTube is a ticking a time bomb, and after enough time passes we'll inevitably lose a lot of things that brought us value en masse, and the scale of loss will be far greater than in the past because of the breadth of content and the sheer ubiquity of YouTube.
I completely agree. I'm apart of a generation that grew up with technologies like YouTube, Facebook, etc. I think the majority of my generation sees the internet as a platform to project themselves, rather than a very valuable tool. I've learned countless things on the internet for free that I would've had to pay thousands for without it. I wish people would realize this.
On the flip side to your closing statement, YouTube has been a boon to DIY. What used to be trade secrets are now on display by people all all professions. Anecdotally, I’ve remodeled nearly my entire house over they past ten years with YouTube.
yeah, the democratization of knowledge was 100% worth it. the only thing we can do from here is try to make it better
Youtube is a metaphysical sun bursting out with multiple different interpretations of any given topic, 90% of them subtlety wrong. Very few have anything original to say. They pad their ten minute timer with history, use youtube's suggested topics and only 1-2 minutes of the episode covers what you want, and usually from such a limited perspective that the little details will still trip you up. For every Ben Eater, there's thousands of poorly aimed videos that clog up your brainspace.
There's also people deliberately misrepresenting knowledge for clicks & selling products. Micheal Crichton was right not to be concerned about the fall of journalism. He said (to effect) anybody can write whatever they want. The value is in the edited content. Which he meant by mainstream, validated press agencies that used to control most intepretation. The concept still applies, most of youtube will not be missed.
I think Crichton was only half right. The value is not in the edited content, it's in having a single narrative going through society. Even if that narrative is partially wrong.
I feel like society is in the midst of restructuring itself to the reality that there will never be a single narrative again.
And I think that's ok because we're reverting back, societally, to a time before mass media. So we know it's possible for societies to function without a single overarching narrative.
(Not to go too far off, but the same thing seems to be coming as a result of deep fakes -- reverting to a time where 1st person accounts from a reputable person were the only reliable evidence. [Where reputation was something of an organic page rank algorithm.])
If you're after better explainer/education content without that kind of pressure on creators, check out Nebula. Paid and adfree, money goes proportionally to people you watch. It's not a super smooth experience sometimes, but I'm a happy subscriber.
> Not much of it actually helps me.
Neither do TV or movies for the most part; there are many examples of high art in those formats but the most popular examples thereof are hardly at all intellectually gratifying, educational, or otherwise "helpful", as you put it (a good descriptor). It's entertainment - it's there for fun, and in many cases, it's there for the sake of art. (That's not to say that e.g. popcorn flicks don't have any artistic qualities, just that they're aiming for the former, not the latter.) The issue is more in the ways that YouTube tries to keep you watching, like the other massive social media sites.
No one else, ever, has had a platform where an independent video creator could start with a handful of viewers and build up to millions, and even potentially make a career out of it. No, it's not common, there's a ton of work involved with no immediate payout, and it requires at least a bit of luck with the dreaded "algorithm", but it's probably more merit-based than what we had before, and that's a wonderful thing.
(I'm not entirely certain about that last bit, hence "probably". How merit-based was/is TV and film, precisely? I just find it hard to believe that they're better than YouTube, given the quantity of quality creators on it who could never find a slot, much less an audience, on any other platform or format that has ever been.)
With regard to the ubiquity: given the lack of competitors, apparently the capital requirements are so high and the lock-in effects so strong that there aren't any companies willing to give it a go. The closest thing we have, Twitch, filled a niche that YouTube wasn't technically capable of at the time, grew large enough before YouTube decided to try to enter that market so Twitch was able to acquire those same lock-in effects, and was bought by Amazon who provides the capital to ensure a smooth experience (Twitch prior to the acquisition was far more prone to performance issues).
> I wonder where the time would have went if we were not enterprising enough to invent big data and portable streams and engagement metrics.
Do remember channel surfing on your dumb, terrestrial, flow TV? Hours spend clicking "next channel" on the remote, cycling the same 5-10 channels, passing by the same program, again and again.
That's where the time would have gone.
Sounds like a nightmare. Thank God for Netflix and YouTube, even though they bring their own set of problems.
> YouTube has only existed for fifteen years, but it might continue to exist for centuries.
Is YouTube profitable yet?
I really doubt YouTube will last for centuries, or even twenty or thirty more years. There was a point where it seemed like Geocities was ubiquitous and would be around forever, and now it's gone. Internet services don't have a great track record for longevity. When YouTube finally goes kaput, much of its content will likely be lost, since I don't see Google going through the effort of offering archivists a dump.
Though, I'm kinda skeptical that even much digital data will last for centuries, unless formats and storage media ossify at some point on some long-term stable standard. The trend towards cloud storage makes things even more precarious.
> Is YouTube profitable yet?
Google doesn't disclose that. Only that Youtube have revenues of $15 billion last year.
Youtube and similar platforms were preceded by cable, broadcast television, newspaper, radio, rental media, and books. Presumably if any of those had suddenly disappeared people would similarly feel lost without them, but as time goes on it becomes possible to replace or augment the older technologies without missing them or getting rid of them entirely. Probably youtube will be the same. Hopefully archivists can rescue all the content before its eventual demise.
It's an incredible surveillance system in so many ways. Only a few DASH video segments ever get cached locally, so even re-watching an old favorite video involves making requests that give away my identity, geographic location, and current interest.
Right. What youtube does to the audience is disgusting. What it does to creators is much worse.
When a channel does well, the channel owner starts thinking, he can quit his day job and go fulltime as a youtuber. They borrow money and invest huge sums in building a studio. Then, they realize that they need to post not just regularly but often. You can feel that they are getting burned out. Sometimes, there will be a post titled "life update" where they will hint at it but will soon succumb to the fact they have no way out. They have to post a rate that is worse than torture.
Sometimes, Youtube gets upset or somebody takes offense and makes a complaint. The channel suffers a steep fall in traffic. The channel owner complains but gets no response.
This sounds a bit personal. Are you currently dealing with this burnout?
I can imagine a world without YouTube. People would just watch videos on Facebook, Instagram, Twitch, Netflix, etc. etc.
> YouTube has only existed for fifteen years, but it might continue to exist for centuries
Get a grip. Media companies come and go. They always seem unassailable at their apex.
Can you give an example of a major media company that no longer exists? CBS,NBC,ABC,Fox, etc have existed for ages.
There's tons that no longer exist as independent entities. Of the Big 5 movie studios, only MGM is still independent. 20th Century Fox is under Disney, Paramount is under CBS, and Warner Bros is under AT&T, though they retain some identity still.
But RKO is just straight up dead, which I don't think anyone would have called in 1943, its 15th year. 1946 would be its most profitable year. It was gone in 1957.
And Youtube is under Google since 2006.
That would be the case if YouTube wasn't acquired by Google and totally an independent company, it would most likely be dead by now. Like other social networks and media companies, they come and go with the times.
An example of a non-media company wanting to exist for 'centuries', I guess Evernote is dreaming to join the ranks of IBM, Nintendo, etc when they still want to be a 100 year old startup. [0] I think reality says other wise.
[0] https://www.fastcompany.com/3012870/evernotes-quest-to-becom...
> YouTube has only existed for fifteen years, but it might continue to exist for centuries.
> AOL has only existed for fifteen years, but it might continue to exist for centuries.
Things change. No one can predict how, or why. But time marches on.
Yes, I guess it's a bit arrogant to suggest that this one form of media is somehow different from all the others that came before it, and we've somehow finally reached the optimum because YouTube is special for some reason. Nobody can really pretend to know this at present. Maybe I was more imagining what the future would be like if it were true, looking back on the present.
Although, when AOL was around you could only practically use the Internet from a large desktop machine, but now you can access a massive amount of information from almost anywhere using a smartphone. And we're being introduced to computers at a younger age, and are spending more time with them. But that might not be indicative of what happens in the future.
The situation isn't quite the same though. Youtube is backed by one of the biggest company on earth. They have the means to either buy their competition, copy them or destroy them.
There was demand and there were video services on the internet way before youtube, there have been others in parallel existence with youtube, and there will be others in the future, whether youtube exists or not.
Out of habit, I do go to youtube if I need to search a video of something.
This. People like to complain about facebook, but I spend way more times watching youtube and getting political ads there. If you live in california it’s awful (prop 22, prop 23, I will die if you don’t vote for it!) or san diego (BARBARY BrIE WAS ASLEEP on THE JoB).
Then there is the obvious “the algorithm can dictate what you watch” that tik tok was so critiqued for.
> Not much of it actually helps me.
This is an excellent point. With the multitudes of content competing for our attention, it's important to be very selective and deliberate with usage. Otherwise, it can very easily turn into an addiction - you'll be mindlessly enjoying the dopamine hits of watching "interesting" videos whilst life passes by.
I didn’t notice it was down.
Now if HN were down...
Downdetector seems like a great place to advertise. You have a bunch of people who were forced to abandon the provider of whatever type of service that your company may offer. What a great opportunity to show customers your competing product.
Maybe for other types of service yes, I find difficult to plug a alternative to YouTube, other type of streaming services maybe? Netlfix etc
YouTube is the one-stop-shop of internet videos. Any specific niche has a competitor, but none of them seriously competes with the whole of YouTube.
I noticed the outage because I wanted to watch a stream, so I might go to Twitch now. Often I use Youtube for music, where Spotify is a solid alternative with many of the same creators. If I want to see that video from reddit of people throwing burning flares at a balcony I can probably find it on LiveLeak. Many of the educational channels I've subscribed are also on Nebula, but I could also watch a documentary on Netflix or Disney+ instead.
My daughter could not do her homework assignment, her Google classroom is linked to YouTube. Thank goodness I was able to find the video she was looking for on Dailymotion. I haven’t been to the site in over 10 years
Vimeo is my first stop when I can’t get it on YouTube.
It's niche but I like that a lot of filmmakers seem to be on there. Often I can find the individual people behind well-produced Apple ads for example.
The problem is that most of my subscribed channels are not in Vimeo, so I lose a lot of meaningful content
I wonder why syndication is not more of a thing. Surely there must be a simple tool to upload your video to multiple platforms at once?
LBRY and Bitchute can automatically mirror your YT channel, and IIUC the former can also automatically upload videos to YouTube, maybe even on a customizable delay. Some decent sized channels like minutephysics use LBRY, but even though anecdotal accounts report much higher revenue per view and no decrease in YouTube exposure, it’s still certainly a uphill battle to compete with a de facto monopoly that can afford to hemorrhage money and just get more from a massive gatekeeper of the web.
Would you risk losing ad revenue if you posted to content providers who pay less?
(I have no idea whether YT revenue is meaningful for smaller players, to be clear; I suspect not, but I also suspect it's worse elsewhere.)
I'm pretty sure Vimeo is paid, so it's sadly a non-starter for many creators.
YouTube Music user here. Fired up Windows Media Player for the first time in ages, and told it to scan my old folder of ripped CDs.
If you're Windows user maybe try lightweight option like foobar2000?
or WinAmp?
Is WinAmp still alive? I last used it a couple of decades ago!
That llama's ass ain't gonna whip itself!
There's a 2018 copyright date in the footer, so I guess that's as alive as it needs to be.
Vudu, Spotify, Pandora. I think there's a wide enough overlap that plenty of people could say "give us a try" when YouTube goes down.
Yeah... But you still don't get the content from the youtube creators that you follow, usually I go for youtube just to see a few selected channels
https://anim8.io for animation fans
'PeerTube: the federated video streaming service that's resilient to down time'
LBRY?
At least one vlogger I follow posts duplicate content on Bitchute (which is up).
Wow, the front page of bitchute is 100% conspiracy. Is that... umm... what it's known for?
I guess that there are a lot of fringe channels on Bitchute that are banned or restricted on Youtube or Facebook Video.
But Youtube doesn't only ban conspiracists and hate speech. They also will restrict content that violates their community standards such as explicit instructions on slaughtering chickens on a farm, or how to field-dress a deer when hunting.
Even the Rob the Ranger channel has had videos taken down for inappropriately explicit content, when showing lions mating for example.
Youtube throws a wide net, and thus rather unfairly censors innocent content. Bitchute, peertube, etc. provide alternative ways to get that content online while you're waiting patiently for your appeal to go through.
And yeah, there's some content that the monitors at Youtube consider objectionable and will never be allowed, and maybe should never be allowed -- snuff films, child porn, terrorism how-to training guides, stuff like that. But I think Bitchute also takes down such content.
> Wow, the front page of bitchute is 100% conspiracy. Is that... umm... what it's known for?
When your main differentiator is "free speech" and your competitors don't actually restrict the speech they carry that much, you're pretty much only going to get the dross that was cast off the other platforms and very little else.
The only time I've used it is for inrange.tv content that isn't allowed on YouTube - things like uncensored gun manufacturing or assembly instructions.
Wouldn't that create an incentive for third parties to block Downdetector, negating its value?
I have a 2-hour-long YouTube video still open, it's continuing to load as I continue to watch it without issues, but new videos aren't working. That's an interesting clue: the CDN isn't down as some people are implying.
Edit 45 min later: Everything appears to be working again, including YouTube TV.
(googler, opinions are my own. I know nothing about youtube specifically)
Youtube likely has lots of moving parts to host all the different systems. Video content, search, browse, player, etc... could all be different bits. And it's also fun to know that video content itself may not be hosted directly by Google, as you could get it from the GGC (Google Global Cache)[0].
When you have a system as big as Youtube, you need to think about all the different ways you can slice different parts of the service. If any of those parts could be more optimized by having the data stored/sorted in some different way, it likely is.
[0] https://support.google.com/interconnect/answer/9058809?hl=en
given that the outage affects redirector.googlevideo.com and youtube.com/get_video_info, but as you say, not the f3---<something>.googlevideo.com domains serving the actual streams, i suspect they have problems with the database storing where streams are actually hosted.
In other words, the metadata service. The actual content servers are still up, so provided you know where the content is, you can still access it.
(Does anyone still remember when you could easily download videos from YT by simply replacing "watch" with "get_video" in the URL? I miss those days... when corporate greed hadn't gotten to where it is today.)
DASH isn't driven by greed really, it simply allows flexibly and seamlessly switching audio and video streams to vary quality. You can change resolution, and it still plays things continuously for you.
But it makes it hard to download, unless you stitch all that on the receiving end, something that youtube-dl does.
Greed and etc. were already piled on top of that with DRM, obfuscation and the like.
youtube videos are drm protected?
That’s what the RIAA argued in the request that made their member Microsoft take down youtube-dl.
Some of them are. IIRC the whole fiasco with YouTube-dl was because the repository had tests indicating how to decode DRM protected videos.
IIUC part of the fiasco was the tests needing to use certain non-libre videos as they were the only ones with the worst DRM, but the RIAA also argued that the simpler obfuscation of normal videos was a “rolling cipher” and an “effective prevention mechanism” or whatever the DMCA legalese for DRM is as well.
Something people seem to forget is circumvention isn't always illegal. You may circumvent copy protection for a work you own the rights to view, so the complaints about youtube-dl are poorly founded.
That's the problem with DMCA 1201. It doesn't care that breaking of DRM can be done for legitimate uses. It just point blank forbids it.
The supposed excuse of that overreach in giving the Librarian of Congress the ability to define exceptions is totally lame and unacceptable.
You didn't understand what I wrote. You can break copy protection if you own the rights to a work. This means you can e.g. circumvent Window's license checking if you own a copy of it already. The DMCA does not criminalize that, nor could it, and this is probably why py-kms is still up on github after a copyright challenge.
This was a change that I am assuming was added before any complaint could be mounted about this use case for fear of striking more of the DMCA down than just that provision that was modified.
Some of them have some kind of intentional obfuscation.
videos with content-matched copyrighted audio have some sort of obfuscation in the js player, mostly to deter casual downloading.
Can confirm. I have a video which was already open and still plays. Interestingly I closed the tab and opened that video again and it still worked. I'm in Sydney
I too was able to watch a 2.5 hour video to completion, while not being able to load new videos during or after that.
I noticed that the mobile UI was updated today. I'm guessing that it's a botched rollout of some bigger changes
Many other services (Google Play, Twitter, …) are affected as well although not as much as YouTube.
Let's see if you make it to the end. I usually have quite a bit of a video downloaded after a few minutes, to the point where I can unplug my network and still watch for a few minutes.
I am watching the network tab continually request from https://r3---sn-n4v7sney.googlevideo.com/videoplayback and succeed each time. There is hardly any buffer, it's all loading successfully in real time.
Also long video 2.5hrs. Still plays after rebooting router, closing and reopening browser
Yeah YouTube music works for me but no videos will play
Same here. Must be a database of some sort.
It's officially confirmed: https://twitter.com/TeamYouTube/status/1326681978037444608
Gotta love that PornHub reply:
Sorry it might be due to my age, but I don't understand this. What's the meaning behind the "Stonks" photo they posted?
If you sometimes have trouble understanding context in meme templetes, check out https://knowyourmeme.com
Search ''Meme text' knowyourmeme' on you search engine and you'll get an answer.
It's used to express expected financial gain
It just means punhub is gonna profit from youtube being down. ie stocks("stonks") rise
But https://nitter.net/punhubonline doesn’t have any videos that I can see.
Some context: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/stonks
Their stock just went up.. reddit wallstreetbets calls stocks, stonks because they claim they're autistic.
Speaking of memes surrounding the outages, I found the top post of r/videos really funny
"Youtube is asleep, post Vimeo" and a link to the old, old viral numa numa video hosted on Vimeo.
[1] https://imgur.com/a/jDYji8s [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/jsky61/youtube_is_a...
On the technology side, I think we're pretty close to the point where small startups can create video hosting platforms. For low traffic, running them through ffmpeg and dropping a <video> tag works pretty well. For higher traffic, I think something like BunnyCDN can be used for a reasonable cost.
But the technology isn't the problem. The problem is nobody is going to use your platform. We need to decouple discovery from hosting. We need a slick, simple aggregator that lets people submit video URLs from multiple platforms, then handles recommendations. If your video has an equal chance of blowing up regardless of where it's hosted, it opens the door for competition with YouTube.
A lot of people who have been banned from having the wrong opinions would like to host their videos somewhere... and some already do.
A useful app that I can think of is one that supports subscribing to various independent video publishing websites... but aggregates them in one app.
If it doesn't support the big boys (ie YouTube), I don't see it going anywhere. And the only interface I'm aware of for subscribing in a way YT doesn't control is the URL, which is just fine with me.
What "wrong opinions" did they have that were so egregious as to get banned?
I recently signed up for Viaplay streaming, and found the whole thing to work much worse than Youtube or Netflix.
I think those 2 are actually leading the pack because they consider themselves technology companies.
doing a `curl -v https://redirector.googlevideo.com` (the host you'll connect to before getting redirected to the actual mp4/m4a streams) opens a tls connection (and gives a cert), but it then hangs for two minutes, before returning a 502.
i'd wager some database storing info about the streams crashed :^D (given that it also crashes on /, it's more likely something else)
I remember hearing something like Google Global Cache proxies requests to Google datacenters so that retransmit times, due to last mile issues, are lower since packets do not need to travel all the way to the datacenter. My guess is that they might do HTTP TLS termination there, and when the backend failed to respond in time returned 502.
yep. thinking it over, that makes more sense. amended my comment
Turns out Youtube-DL was being used by YouTube also. ;)
and now youtube.com/get_video_info, the undocumented endpoint for querying (among other things) streaming urls, is broken as well. returns "Video ID is invalid." or "An error occurred. Please try again later."
Downdetector also shows increased error rates for Search, Play, Facebook, Netflix, Twitter, Spotify, Twitch…
What’s going on?
More users / higher loads due to people being stuck inside?
edit: I assumed you meant more in general over the past weeks or months, not right now - if that's the case.
But those are indeed some interesting patterns, that so many websites are getting the same spikes.
That can't be it. These issues are all coinciding and if you look at the graphs they all started at the same time. This points to a lower level networking issue somewhere.
I think it's just because Downdetector is getting tons of traffic which makes it think people are having more issues than usual with virtually everything. I haven't heard any actual people say Spotify, Twitter, or Twitch are down.
There are reports on reddit about inability to download apps from Play Store, but I cannot verify.
Doesn’t Downdetector count only users who click on “I have a problem with [service]”? It would seem dumb if all charts moved together any time there is a major outage of a single service.
Oh so that's what that was.
I just ran into that issue trying to download a few different apps an hour ago but figured it was my phone. Something is definitely up, too much of a coincidence for these issues to be happening at the same time
> Doesn’t Downdetector count only users who click on “I have a problem with [service]
Down detector scraps sites (twitter and reddit) for 'website.com down' and marks a spike
Was wondering so looked up how much YouTube lost per second.
> YouTube ads generated $15.15 billion in revenue in fiscal year 2019.
So plugged into wolfram alpha:
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/? i=15.15+billion+dollars+per+number+of+seconds+in+a+year
They lose about $480 per second or $1.7MM per hour. Yikes.
And we know that it isn't flat throughout the day. I imagine this is probably peak earning time for them, assuming they bulk of the revenue is US based.
Why MM, is it the standard for million akin to "k" is for thousand?
"M" is the roman numeral for thousand. It is therefore ambiguous. Especially when dealing with money, you really don't want a million to be confused with a thousand.
"Mille" is French for 1,000. So MM = 1,000 * 1,000. M is also used in advertising, like CPM: Cost Per Mille.
MM looks like "million million" to me, which is the old standard for billion but nowadays a billion is just a thousand million and a million million is a trillion and I am constantly feeling frustrated about how wasteful we are with words for big numbers.
But I think in this context MM is a million.
That was my exact thoughts seeing MM too yeah, the Roman M symbol meaning thousand clears it up though. Just a historical oddity.
MM means mil mil or 1000 1000. Its the roman numeral for 1,000,000 and typically used today in finance.
MM is 2000 in roman numerals though. It's additive, not multiplicative.
In finance mm is generally accepted to mean million.
Also plus the cost of losing users due to long term adverse effects of this incident.
I don’t think anyone is going to stop using YouTube because of a small downtime. There is really no alternative to it out there.
What about the new users visiting the site for the 1st time in that small downtime window? If their first experience sucks there is likelihood they won't come back.
So:
(number of new users) x (probability of those users not coming back) x (lifetime value of a youtube user) = I highly doubt this is equal to 0
I truly believe that the number of people that navigated to youtube for the first time ever in their lives during that window might actually be 0.
So you believe YT's growth rate == 0?
Too bad, the popup for youtube premium still works.
.. and I just managed to get the YouTube app on Android to play an ad. That's two for two of the annoying things that are still (sorta) working. ;)
Plus, the comments are still there!
"Do you want videos to continue playing in the background?" is an even more annoying ad when the video isn't playing at all
Look at the charts on downdetector homepage - multiple major sites all got hit by something simultaneously and are all trending back down almost identically.
Might be embedded YouTube Videos not working in a lot of cases. The correlation is there but the numbers are at least two magnitudes lower on those other services.
Netflix graph is following the same trend as sites like Spotify though?
WTF...???
Seems like just the video player is down - homepage loads with thumbnails, and when you click on a video, everything but the video player renders. What I find interesting is that scrolling through a video still displays closed captions and even the thumbnail preview of the timestamp you're hovering over. Curious if anyone know what causes something like this?
Captions and thumbnails come from a different part of the CDN. Same with Netflix. The videos come from devices dedicated to large files, the captions and thumbnails come from a CDN designed for small files.
How fun - same goes with the previews on hover over timestamps then, I guess?
Most likely. Any small file comes from a different CDN than the video.
Interesting, thank you! :)
thumbnails both static and animated are served from i.ytimg.com/vi/ thumbnail preview is also server from i.ytimg.com/sb/
videos however come from redirector.googlevideo.com/videoplayback
Same here in socal, and look at those DownDetector report numbers[0]. Baseline 30, now almost 200,000 reports. I wonder what could be going on to cause this level of global service degradation.
Perhaps related, I uploaded a video earlier today that took nearly 4 hours to process, though it was only ten minutes long.
Another reference, but the /r/youtube reddit thread[0] for this issue has users reporting globally
[0]: https://old.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/jsjwzq/youtube_dow...
Reuters: YouTube back up after worldwide outage
"We're so sorry for the interruption. This is fixed across all devices & YouTube services," YouTube said in a tweet https://bit.ly/36r4sjz, without explaining what had caused the outage.
Google did not respond to a Reuters request for comment on the outage.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-youtube-outages/youtube-b...
YouTube's tweet: https://nitter.net/TeamYouTube/status/1326709701526974464
Sorry... I think I broke YouTube when I converted my Google Music account over to YT. Happened at the exact same time! /s (but really at the same time)
Did you register as "First name: Null" and "Second name: [object Object]"?
Bobby tables strikes again :/
Now that YouTube is back up I take this opportunity to put this thread to a good use and ask what does it take to create an alternative to YouTube?
Would love your opinions/wish list/must haves.
Our opinions and wish lists don’t matter. Content creators make money from being on YouTube. If you want to create an actual alternative, be ready to subsidize the income of a couple thousand content creators to the level that they can afford lambos. Then maybe you can create a competitor. Maybe. Because the step after that is to throw money at global infrastructure and still somehow make a profit.
The question wasn't so much what the content creators want as much as what the average viewers wants. I get that viewers are seeking creators' content, but going a step beyond that what are some of the things in the first place that if implemented would create a viable alternative to YouTube?
Is this a thought experiment or are you actually wanting to create an alternative to YouTube?
So basically TikTok stretches into YouTube.
Also Twitch.
Although I sometime upload things to YouTube, I'm primarily a YouTube viewer. Nevertheless, I think that the greatest strength of YouTube is the ease of uploading content. So many people have uploaded so much material on so many topics that just about anything you might want to learn about or enjoy is likely to be covered well on YouTube.
Many people have pointed out issues with recommendation algorithms, both on YouTube and elsewhere—particularly the “falling down the rabbit hole” phenomenon of getting deeper and deeper into conspiracy theories. I generally stay away from politics on YouTube, though, and most of my recommendations are actually quite helpful: good videos on topics that I’ve been viewing recently or have searched for.
So, for me at least, alternatives to YouTube would have to have those two features at a minimum: seamless uploading with few restrictions, and good recommendations. Whether that would be feasible commercially I have no idea.
Oh, one more thing: Hire the HN guys to design the moderation system for the new service's comments. YouTube comments are, in general, horrible.
> good recommendations
That would be sweetly ironic, considering Google's original success came from better search.
What I would like is for creators to be able to influence the recommendations on their videos. Maybe not "prefer my own videos", but "prefer videos by $other_creator" or "never recommend videos by $nutjob". I usually ignore the algorithmic recommendations outright and only pay attention to when the creators I know call out other channels in their videos.
First, collect a few billion dollars....
Do you have any evidence for that?
Building the tech part of product is not challenging part.
Distribution has always been historically expensive for any content. While digital distribution is cheaper than ever, B/W costs for a product like YT is enormous .
To make unit economics to any sense, you will need to spin your own CDN and buy b/w from other CDNs when that it is cheaper. For your own CDN, you are looking at few hundred PoPs and thousands of peering agreements with ISPs in each geography maybe lease cables too . This is a substantial investment.
Even if do all this you still have to compete with Google on android where they have a distinct advantage, YT is pre-installed in billions of devices and user account already activated. You will have to pay OEMs a lot of money to get the same kind of user base pre-installed and still do your own user activation.
There is a reason why nobody is trying seriously. the next largest competitors DailyMotion and Youku are 1% of YT size.
The folks at MindGeek probably can answer that better than anyone.
p0rn is not really an alternative to YT
Election production freeze ending?
I wonder how many little children were throwing fits because YouTube was down. And I mean literal children like my friends toddlers with tablets.
I was trying to load a workout video, and it worked on my phone but I wanted to cast it to my TV. I turned off/on my router and Wi-Fi, reset chromecast, restart the phone, restarted the laptop. I was about to just try to do it from my laptop, did a quick survey of the home network, and then the TV started working again. Haha my workout was delayed about 20 or 30 minutes
5 bucks on BGP
Possibly, but the pages and ads load fine, just the videos are broken, so I'd take your bet (idiomatically; I'm not a betting person).
That makes sense to me, because dynamic pages are not served from a CDN, which do a lot more BGP and routing trickery that could go wrong.
That's fair, but Google's BGP errors tend to be global. To my knowledge they've never killed their CDN and not everything else. (I have no non-public knowledge, I just pay attention).
Will be looking forward to their report.
I get a 502 error trying to load the actual video stream
My understanding is that there was a pretty major fiber cut somewhere on the backbone...
Networking would be a likely cause.
Usually this type of site-wide outage is always related to networking.
BGP, not sure. Google practices SDN. So their software error can rekt a large chunk of infrastructure...
This will be interesting and humbling for 'resilient services' advocates.. Nodes can be down but services will not go down..
I'd want to know what caused this. I'm guessing they're running on kubernetes, but it too early to tell what actually must have failed..
clearly there are points of failure and not sufficient backups to that point of failure..
I'd be surprised. I don't think kubernetes is the main platform google uses to deploy their stuff.
It's not a secret that we use Borg, you can read about it online.
Yep, ofcourse it's borg and not kubernetes.
the site loads fine for me but their content CDN seems to have given up on serving videos.
The play store appears to not be serving any downloads. Sounds like some serious CDN issues.
I vpn'd around, this appears to be global. While reading something unrelated my video suddenly started playing.
I think it's load balancer related for whatever is serving their videos
EDIT: Once you have a connection you appear to keep it the entire way through (at least it did for me with youtubedl). Something related to connection queueing...
yep, had long video opened (in mplayer) when this started. I stopped it while reading your post, trying to reconnect results in 502.
On client side looks like requests for the video stream return 502 'bad gateway'.
I actually get back a little webpage it says:
502. That’s an error.
The server encountered a temporary error and could not complete your request.
Please try again in 30 seconds. That’s all we know.> XXX. That’s an error. > > [...]. That’s all we know
How old is this? I think I've always seen this error message from Google. It's at least 15 years old.
Cool, I came here to confirm that YT broken and not my local setup :-) HN is pretty reliable sometimes.
The most interesting thing about the YouTube outage for me was that attempting to play a video would result in my cooling fans spinning up to max while the loading spinner looped in the background. Closing the tab they spun down to normal levels.
There wasn’t anything unusual about my CPU behavior when this happened, I can only assume it was GPU or some other part of the system (unfortunately I was too busy to do more than basic troubleshooting at the time.)
Youtube music seems to be down too.
and youtube tv.
Pages load, but videos don't.
Captions, thumbnails, webpage html, etc. come from a different part of the CDN. Same with Netflix. The videos come from devices dedicated to large files, the captions and thumbnails come from a CDN designed for small files.
This is why youtube-dl is needed.
Does anyone want to try to calculate how much money google is losing every second YouTube is down? It must be astronomical, on the order of Amazon.
As a YouTube Premium user I will be supporting them through this tough time.
Amazon's revenue is ~10k/second.
Based on a recent 15B/year YouTube revenue figure I found, that would mean ~$500/second.
That's "peanuts" then, a couple of millions for `~1h down.
Early evening in North America is probably particularly valuable time.
BitChute is down also.
Unless BitChute is hosted in Google Cloud and this is just a Google Cloud problem, I have a feeling something major is being censored.
Interesting how Instagram was also down for multiple days just recently [0]..
[0] https://www.businessinsider.in/tech/apps/news/instagram-down...
FWIW, I don't think this YouTube outage has anything to do with the Instagram outage you are referring to.
Could you share with us what "Interesting" means to you? I wasn't able to interpret what it means without additional explanation.
Same here in socal, and look at those report numbers. Baseline 30, now almost 190,000 reports. I wonder what could be going on to cause this level of global service degradation.
Perhaps related, I uploaded a video earlier today that took nearly 4 hours to process, though it was only ten minutes long.
So we've already broken 5 9's of uptime, will we also break 4 9's as well?
Could this be related to people running a Takeout after the Photos announcement?
With the YouTube app I figured out we can watch new videos by starting a download to the local device... my 3 year old was starting to get very nervous that our bedtime routine was going to be disrupted
Interestingly, trying to install the Chrome browser now will fail.
So is speedtest.net. I wonder how they're related (if at all)
190,000 people running a speed test at the same time.
Just a guess.
So mine both restored working at the same exact second. speedtest and youtube. Just saying...
Oh I’ve had my internet troubles fixed several times by going to that domain. Saw one guy write a script to ping it every 15 minutes.
Now to be fair, When in a meeting, I’ve al had to track down the kids and all devises that could possibly access YouTube.
After a really bad hour of Zoom; I leaned that you can watch YouTube on the switch. Clever kids.
I locked away a 10 year kindle just out of principe for that one.
You may want to invest in an IQrouter or an equivalent DIY, though if you DIY and your issue is wifi congestion you'll find that only applying fq_codel to the modem side won't help with the wifi side.
You can firewall their devices. I used to do that to my dad's cloud-based cameras back when I was in highschool. He never figured it out. Always assumed it was the ISP's fault.
Most routers support some form of qos
Sounds plausible, my first guess when youtube went down was that my connection was messed up
It looks like it's a CDN issue, which might affect many things using GCP for large files.
The Play Store also seems to be having problems downloading APKs. CDN issues sounds pretty likely.
Speedtest and youtube restored for me at the exact same second. I had the windows open side-by-side. Not my area of expertise but I believe you now
If I made a speed test I'd probably include streaming videos from the common sites.
Maybe speedtest.net downloads a YouTube video to measure your speed /s
This is why I was having issues watching Youtube 1.5 hours ago. I thought it was my internet, kept doing all kinds of stuff because I was having slow internet in general.
I know there's a whole "infrastructure as code" and "immutable infrastructure" thing happening, but how about "revertible"?
If your infrastructure is codified, you should be using versioning for it as well.
That can be considered necessary but not sufficient.
Sometimes I wonder why other big tech companies don't even try to create something to compete with YouTube.
YT have been the only player in the game for far too long.
YouTube is barely profitable/not profitable and probably wouldn’t be without the Google ad ecosystem. Video isn’t cheap.
Honestly, people should be double-uploading videos to BitChute. We all instinctively hate Google, and distrust them already so their demise is sure.
You should double-upload only if you donate to Bitchute. Otherwise, you will overload their limited resources.
I’m able to successfully get a video to load and play by selecting it from the recommended videos of a video that fails to load.
Edit: looks like it might be back up now.
Huh, weird. I was just able to start a video with youtube-dl + mpv (it took a few tries), but I still can't access anything from the website.
Google Play Music/YouTube Music are slow to load streams for me, but do eventually play.
EDIT: just kidding - playback is intermittently hanging now.
my browser shown an CORS related error, its weird
CORS errors are false positives for a large amount of causes. For example, if loading a website causes an 502 or other error, that might not set the required CORS header, thus making it illegal for javascript to access the response in a number of ways.
Oh! And I thought it was something with my setup. Didn't want to fiddle with it atm, and just closed it. Phew! :)
I wonder if it is due to Alibaba's 11.11 indirectly DDOSing them because of so much new livestreaming load.
redirector.googlevideo.com/videoplayback works again, but it looks like they just lost metadata servers. No metadata loads on video pages, but if you happen to have pages opened from the time they still worked you can play videos fine.
EDIT: and its all back up to working
Video playback just spinning here.
Google Play Store also appears unable to download apps, in Maryland at 7:40p EST.
Same in New Zealand.
Gmail mails cannot be loaded either. While the frontpage seems working.
So is speedtest.net. I wonder how they're related (if at all)
Maybe it's something Google Cloud related?
Maybe speedtest.net downloads a YouTube video to measure your speed /s
502 bad gateway (21s response time) for redirector.googlevideo.com
Is just a temporary degradation, probably...
Edit: Err, probably more serious
Still down in TX. Noticing other sites offline as well.
Google cloud (GCP) outage maybe?
Their dashboard says everything is up: https://status.cloud.google.com/
I remember a time when AWS went down and their status page said everything was fine. I think it had something to do with static content hosted on S3.
I wonder if Google is have their moment :)
us-east-1 could literally be wiped off the map by a meteor and the AWS status page would show yellow triangle with "Elevated API error rates" for several days
"It wasn't completely down because we had one rack in AZ A which was not impacted because we launched it to space on a Blue Origin rocket and forgot to remove the us-east-1 label."
Back up. Back to watching Janey Godley videos..
South East Asia region seems to back to normal
Back up for me in central Europe.
Was just about to post this... pretty crazy
Mixcloud is down as well. CDN is my bet.
socialblade seems to be broken now for all searches of channels not already in their database.
I thought that using kubernetes would have solved these issues of high availability no?
seems like these web services always have to go own eventually.
YouTube music never stopped working.
Youtube DL and PeerTube here we come
Okay, but why was Youtube down?
Down in Thailand at the moment.
Youtube TV is down for me too
it works now edit: it's down again, i can't even see the play button
Not working for me yet. (Australia)
Down in New Zealand. Perhaps a failed algorithm update with the intention of breaking youtube-dl?
If so, it is an amazing fail. On my end:
Videos viewed via website since it went down: 0
Videos downloaded via youtube-dl since it went down: 2
(Granted, there were plenty of retries by youtube-dl.)
Youtube-DL is the only working part about youtube right now. What a world. FOSS ftw
Why? Do we have any reason to think YouTube is unhappy about youtube-dl?
That was my thought too.
I was suspecting something similar since I run heavy ad blocking.
Still dead in California.
Still down in Scotland
Back now in India
It's been down for the last 10 minutes again
down across australia
Is just a temporary degradation
Probably...
Works for me now.
Back now in NZ
Still down for me in Sacramento CA
It's working for me on the East Coast.
What a moment!
Still down in Serbia.
IT'S BACK
Perhaps context will help: Pacific Northwest (PNW) here.
Seattle.
EDITs: More specific in location.
Pacific Northwest? I've lived in the US all my life and had to guess, not sure PNW is known to most outside of the Western North America
I'm in Oregon, and it's still down for me.
Down in eastern Washington still..
No it is not. Flagged.
Why so serious?
And cue all other major services going down in the next few days.
I'm not at that level of paranoia yet. In fact, I'm a long way from it.
If it happens, though, my paranoia is going to climb dramatically...
If you’re having trouble watching videos on YouTube right now, you’re not alone –We’ll follow me @adys.7 for updates.
Recalling mr.Stallman. This is a good reminder about what can happen with all of your online projects/ data/disk storage/letters/photos/notes once it stops working ...I never stored things online.
I would hope most content creators aren't using Youtube as a primary storage medium. It's not as if the site forces them to delete their original copy after uploading, after all.
Do you have an idea how much disk space the original copy (keeping in mind that it's always in the highest resolution available) takes? If the content creator has limited disk space (and many people do not have the money to keep buying external disks), it's not hard to imagine the original copy being removed to free enough space to create more content. Also, even if it was not deleted on purpose, there's a higher chance of the original copy of older videos getting lost (for instance, if it was stored in an external disk which was lost in a flood).
And there are also the videos where the "original copy" was on YouTube itself: unless you have a setup to also record locally (or mirror to another site like twitch), streaming videos are only recorded on YouTube.
In the light of the recent events with Apple when you cannot even run programs on your own computer without problems if Apple server doesn't allow it, perhaps some downvoters should give another thought on this
Air gap and cold storage.
Microservices in action! Can visit the site, see comments, but can't play videos. Go to twitter, check the latest tweets containing "youtube down", thousands of results coming.
Now I know why I used to download all my favorite videos to USB/SSD!
Microservices out of action in this case
Select microservices in action! If AWS/GCP/Azure are taking score, then this isn't an outage because DNS resolves a-ok!
What on Earth are you on about
GCP doesn't consider it to be an "outage" if you are able to access a website (e.g "youtube.com") and get a 200 OK response. So, when you go to the status page for the cloud service, it will show green checkmarks, meaning everything is ok.
But, the video you are trying to watch won't load, and will throw a 500 error. But this isn't considered downtime, for them.
Ah I see.
Yeah I've had nothing but grief with those outage detectors. They seem to be really optimistic and not take into account the web of CDN's that contribute to the 'uptime' of a website