500 Internal error at YouTube

[avinoth]

Well, you can get a 500 error from facebook via this URL.

http://facebook.com/logout

[alch-]

They're working on getting this fixed as soon as they can, though ;-)

[Ocerge]

uh, wow

[arenaninja]

What. How. Wow. Haha.

[gbraad]

My kid got soooooo upset: "Daddy, fix it. I wanna see the Beetle monster truck". Imagine me trying to explain that 'monkeys will fix the problem for him' :-P. He was eager to wait... hoping to see the monkeys... but none came while refreshing the page. As soon as the Beetle baja buggie video loaded, all about he monkeys was forgotten.

[friendly_chap]

At first I was kinda surprised at your comment (not even sure why, maybe because it lacked snark...), but then I realised it is a prime example of how our (techies) work actually affects lives, experiences etc, something we often forget.

Thanks for reminding

[crschmidt]

Hi.

I work on the YouTube Quality of Experience team. We measure time spent waiting for YouTube videos to load, and things like errors on video playback.

The next time your son has problems where he needs a YouTube monkey, you can give him a link to http://imgur.com/QZqAH2W

[drdoom]

We have been doing this in all of our web applications for over a decade now. Essentially, whenever there is an error, we don't just display the error message as-is. All the technical or trace info it contains seems to scare users. So, we simply encrypt it and display a base64-encoded version of it. It also gets saved into a log file.

Users are more comfortable with this way: they simply copy/paste the text to us and we have all the info we need.

[grogenaut]

What happens if there's an error in the crypto handling system? Edit: Not a troll, I'm seriously interested in "minimum required functional systems" in the case.

[TimGremalm]

"If you see them, send them this information as text (screenshots frighten them)" Love this!

[mpnordland]

Seems we've scared the Google monkeys away from HN again. Now we'll never get an AMA.

[FoxInBoxers]

Anyone know what's in that debug information the 500 error page spits out?

[ge0]

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21681084/decoding-youtube...

[mpnordland]

Looks base64 encoded to me, but running it through a decoder isn't giving me anything intelligible. Here's a OCR of the text in the image, maybe you can figure it out: Edit: Full text is in sibling comment.

[leni536]

I got a similar 500 Internal error trying to watch a video (not search, not front page). First 6 characters appear to be the same for the error: http://pastebin.com/ibxLurkr

I wonder if someone could make sense of the error or if it's actually encrypted.

[thomasreggi]

code monkey jonathan coulton: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYodWEKCuGg

[conradfr]

I got it on this one : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6U16XShROI8

[conradfr]

Not anymore.

[talles]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7210750

[Fuxy]

Hm... wonder if there's a library that could do something similar.

It's an interesting idea encrypting your error that I haven't seen in many places.

[forgotpwtomain]

What could the purpose of an encrypted error be? If it's a server side error it's already in their logs.

[VMG]

Is it encrypted? Too lazy to OCR and `base64 -d` myself...

[StavrosK]

..so?

[jbg_]

Spotify is down too. Didn’t they move to Google Cloud recently?

[ayyn0n0n0]

Back up for me now.

[jswny]

I don't get it. Have people not seen this before?

[owobeid]

Yeah, just got that as well :(

[smegel]

Back again.