14 DAY TRIAL // Even if YouTube is a very popular service and it's owned by the Mountain View super search giant Google, this doesn't necessarily mean that it has no problems with its servers like many other services on the web. Such a problem occurred yesterday when users from all over the world got in panic after the YouTube page became unbrowseable due to what seems to be an unexpected outage.
According to Allen Stern of CenterNetworks, the YouTube website could be accessed, but no picture displayed on the page was loaded. Moreover, after a few minutes of downtime, the embedded videos were also unavailable. However, some other features like searching for clips worked without any glitch.
The entire downtime lasted about 20 minutes, which according to the CenterNetworks readers, could be seen in Estonia, London and other regions around the world.
According to numbers provided by Pingdom, back in 2007, Google (only the Google.com website and without including the other services belonging to the company) encountered a downtime of seven minutes in a few months. In comparison with the parent company, YouTube had a downtime of four hours and 44 minutes while other popular services such as Amazon, IMDB and Flickr had less than one hour downtimes.
This is not the first time this year when YouTube goes offline due to unmentioned causes because the video sharing service encountered similar problems in February when, according to various sources, the website became unavailable at least twice. Who knows, maybe YouTube wants to beat the 2007 numbers and set a new record...
YouTube is not only unavailable due to unexpected glitches, but also since Google's video service has been banned in several countries due to the content appearing on its page. However, users turn to all kinds of ways to access YouTube which underlines, once again, the growing popularity the Google video sharing service currently has.