A US prime time outage of more than an hour on YouTube shocked users worldwide. Many initially suspected a problem with their WLAN or Internet provider, but according to information from heise online it was a failed configuration update of the Google server that made the user look down the drain in the figurative sense.

The problem occurred early Thursday morning around 1: 15 Clock German time presumably worldwide, we were able to verify the failure in North America, Europe, Asia and Australia. While the web servers continued to work without any problems, so that the entry page, the search function, channel pages and also YouTube Studio were still available and functioning normally, no more videos could be played.

All videos from the platforms YouTube Video, YouTube Music and YouTube TV were affected. YouTube confirmed the problem for YouTube Video after a few minutes on its Twitter channel, and almost an hour later also explicitly for the YouTube TV platform, although, according to our research, no more videos could be viewed there from the start.

Redirects An analysis carried out by heise online during the incident revealed that Google had a problem with the redirector of its video platform googlevideo.com would have. The redirector is responsible for redirecting the player to the actual storage location of the video file via HTTP status code 15 (“Moved Temporarily”). Apparently the redirector could no longer access its video database and only provided the HTTP status code 502 (“Bad Gateway”) for more than an hour. Users only saw black or, if an ad was to be displayed, an indefinite error message on a dark gray background.

For YouTube Content Creators is not only able to see the downtime of more than an hour in the access statistics, it is also immediately reflected in their income.

The Google employees only succeeded after almost two hours to fix the problem. The incident cost content creators with a predominantly American audience a lot of money that they would normally have earned at prime time from access by their viewers – the break-in can be clearly seen in YouTube Analytics.

Google has not yet made any cause Information. As heise online learned from a trustworthy source, a configuration update was introduced at Google at the same time (“configuration push”), which obviously went wrong and could not be easily reversed. At three o’clock German time, YouTube was back on track. (mid)