YouTube confirms six-hour outage was no goof
For roughly six hours on Tuesday, YouTube.com suffered its first-ever “unplanned outage”, depriving millions of office worker and college-kid fans of one of the broadband era’s most popular distractions, spokeswoman Julie Supan confirmed.
Late-night followers of the Internet video phenomenon YouTube are familiar with the Silicon Valley start-up’s quirky habit of taking its site offline for several hours every few weeks for scheduled database maintenance or software upgrades. Normally, these planned outages are signaled in advance to users and accompanied by a joke graphic that makes light of the downtime.
It’s surprising how the company that has surged to become the market leader in short-form Web-based video hasn’t seemed to suffer any loss of audience from its periodic outages.
Indeed, on Tuesday, Internet audience measurement firm comScore Networks released Web traffic data for July that showed how YouTube has surged into the No. 40 ranking among top U.S. Web properties with 16 million visitors, up 20 percent since June.
“We are experiencing a temporary site outage due to a database-related issue,” Supan confirmed in an e-mail to Reuters. “The site has been down since 7:30am (California time/ 14:30 GMT) today and our engineering team expect it to be up and running in the next few hours.”
“To clarify and ensure accuracy, the site is not down for maintenance, the team put up that page mistakenly (it is an old page). “This was an unplanned outage,” Supan said.
Around 1:30 p.m. PDT (20:30 GMT) on Tuesday, public access to the YouTube site was restored.
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