Support our independent tech coverage. Chrome Unboxed is written by real people, for real people—not search algorithms. Join Chrome Unboxed Plus for just $2 a month to get an ad-free experience, access to our private Discord, and more. Learn more about membership here.
START FREE TRIAL (MONTHLY)START FREE TRIAL (ANNUAL)
A little less than an hour ago, users began reporting that YouTube was experiencing some major issues. Downdetector.com is tracking reports from now thousands of users who are unable to watch videos on YouTube and YouTubeTV as well as music from YouTube’s music service.
No word from Mountain View yet as to what has caused the issue but users are posting an endless stream of threads reporting “500 internal server error” in the YouTube help forum. While I understand the frustration, especially for creators who make a living on YouTube, I assure that Google is aware of the issue and are likely all hands on deck to find the fix.
Meanwhile, the New Zealand Police Dept. has taken to Twitter with a public service announcement.
While it is extremely annoying, @YouTube being down is not a police matter #YouTubeDOWN pic.twitter.com/k6OuWth6Xj
— New Zealand Police (@nzpolice) October 17, 2018
Points to the NZPD but they have a good point. It’s not the end of the world and as someone who frequents product help forums and has a number of acquaintances inside Google, give them a break and let them figure out what’s going on with YouTube. Harassing comments, pointless threads and melodramatics only clog up the pipelines and take away from resources that could be used to address the problem.
In the meantime, you can keep track of the outage here.
Update
As of 10:39 PM ET, it appears that YouTube is back in business. We will keep an eye on the site and downdetector for any more issues that may arise.
Special thanks to Jim D. for the NZPD tweet.
