For a brief period of time today, YouTube was brought to its knees. It’s not yet clear why this was the case, but #YouTubeDown immediately began trending on Twitter, as many were greeted with a 500 Internal Server Error and news that YouTube’s “monkeys” were working on the issue.
Needless to say, for those who earn their living on the video-sharing site, this short amount of downtime threw them into an existential crisis of sorts.
#YouTube #YouTubeDOWN @YouTube – Down for you?
— MrHairyBrit (@MrHairyBrit) June 22, 2016
Ok. It looks like youtube is down for most people. We should all huddle together. Everything will be ok I promise.
— Stampy Cat (@stampylongnose) June 22, 2016
When YouTube is down…#youtubedown #youtube pic.twitter.com/qAq3bmMlBp
— blurboi (@blurboi) June 22, 2016
With YouTube being one of the world’s top sites and with so many relying on it to remain online to earn their income, any downtime the website faces inevitably incites widespread panic. Fortunately the website has rarely gone offline in its lifetime, making this something of a momentous occasion.
YouTube nor its parent company Google have revealed why it was taken online, though considering the size of the site we can imagine it was something pretty drastic. We’ll update this story when we learn more.
