Updates with news of YouTube talks with record labels on music videos
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.
Also on Tuesday, YouTube confirmed to Reuters that the company is talking with record labels on plans to post thousands of music videos online, in a bid to become more of a mainstream entertainment site. Read the full Reuters story by Yinka Adegoke.
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[…] On the same day that new Comscore numbers came out indicating new traffic highs for YouTube, the site went down for six hours in the first unplanned outage since launching in February of 2005. Though users were told that new features were in the works, press inquiries have confirmed that it was actually a database failure that took the site down. Periodic planned downtimes at night, US time, are common but today marked the first major service failure for the site. […]
- Posted by Techcrunch » Blog Archive » YouTube goes down for the first timereuters was down too 5 minutes ago, way to go
- Posted by PaulYouTube Was Offline For 6 Hours Because of Database Failure - Is This Really All That Bad?…
Ok… so I hear… YouTube.com was down today… database failure. Yes, I can see how people can jump up and say “Wow… thats BAD!” But come on… is it really all that bad? Don’t get me wrong… I get pissed too when my server is down… but, lets…
- Posted by Blog The Internet[…] Further details are available on the Reuters blog at: http://blogs.reuters.com/2006/08/15/yout ube-confirms-outage-is-no-goof/. […]
- Posted by RampRate » Blog Archive » YouTube suffers first unplanned outage[…] Todays major news, beside YouTubes outage, is that Facebook has opened up its API. A client has emailed me asking if its a good business move or not. […]
- Posted by Next Google » API Opening: Good or Bad for Business?Youtube can go down for six hours every once in a while without losing viewers because, ultimately, it’s not important. Not in the least. Nobody depends on Youtube.
- Posted by Sherman Boyd[…] like Craigslist, MySpace, Yahoo, and eBay get tripped up occasionally (especially YouTube, which is noted for frequent outages). One of the more common mistakes is relying on a single data center for any […]
- Posted by the SilverDock blog » Blog Archive » the Rackspace outage — could it happen to you?[…] consumer video site. It’s still quite surprising, though, that YouTube keeps going down for maintenance during prime viewing hours. Their current downtime (as of 10pm PST) appears to be […]
- Posted by the SilverDock blog » YouTube “down for maintenance”