YouTube Offline for An Hour

YouTube, like the iPod, has become a cultural phenomenon and part of our online lives. From politicians to pointless singers, everyone knows and uses YouTube. And that is why when the largest online video site goes down, it is major news. Of course it results in all sorts of rumors – DNS hacks, domain expirations or aliens landing on the roof of YouTube office (OK I made the last one up).

Actually the explanation might have been less exciting and proved to be a plain old technical snafu of sorts. A YouTube spokesperson said the service went down for an hour due to internal technical issues, and the problems have been fixed.

YouTube like many large consumer websites continues has had a history of outages. Check out the Pingdom page and get a good idea about YouTube’s track record so far. YouTube’s performance seems to have progressively improved since Google acquired the company for $1.6 billion back in 2006. YouTube receives about 10 hours of video per minute, and serves up terabytes of data per second. I will post an update later in the day.