With the amount of attention around this outage, it feels like YouTube has become completely ubiquitous in modern society. I can't imagine a future in which YouTube just ceases to exist. The company has already become tied to the livelihoods of so many people, and has spawned too many significant subcultures.
It's a strange feeling to be alive just after all of the significant technology companies were created and started to gain traction. YouTube has only existed for fifteen years, but it might continue to exist for centuries. The demand that has arisen in people to watch videos online is probably not reversible so long as maintaining a video streaming service is still physically possible. If not YouTube, something else would probably fill in such a void if it ever appears, barring the Apocalypse.
It gives me a lot of conflicting feelings. Twenty years ago, few people would have known they wanted the unique content that YouTube offered that wasn't available at the time, like livestreamers or swathes of content about every single plane crash or minor video game mechanic that can be talked about. But now, thousands have become hooked on them. I can't remember the details, only that I've watched them at some point. I wonder where the time would have went if we were not enterprising enough to invent big data and portable streams and engagement metrics. And for me personally, I can say that I "like" a lot of content, but I'm reasonably certain that's the kind of thing some portion of drug addicts would say about their habits. Not much of it actually helps me.
The notion of media that "actually helps" you is itself just as constructed as YouTube. Interrogate where it comes from and what sort of cultural work it's doing. Does "help" mean that it makes you a better worker? Why doesn't YouTube help you, and is that a bad thing?
Second, the good old days of "before" we were enterprising enough to invent big data etc. is retroactively constituted, and not apparent until its demise. Before YouTube it was television and radio, magazines and books, and even writing itself. On the technology of writing, Plato said "They will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks."
These constructions create the appearance of the industry's indestructibility -- certain consequences (the before, the help, or the livelihoods or subcultures you mention) are taken to axiomatic or self-evident, creating a logical construction that is bulletproof in its circular vacuousness. YouTube will die, just as websites before it have died, and technologies before it have died. What comes next might be better or worse.
That is to say, just enjoy your videos if they make you happy.
The saddest thing about YouTube disappearing would be losing the vast trove of educational content that has amassed over the years. We live in a unique time in history when you can go online and learn how to do absolutely anything you want for free. I feel like the majority of people still hugely underestimate how valuable this is. Granted, there's a lot of junk to wade through. But the information is out there.
On the flip side to your closing statement, YouTube has been a boon to DIY. What used to be trade secrets are now on display by people all all professions. Anecdotally, I’ve remodeled nearly my entire house over they past ten years with YouTube.
Youtube is a metaphysical sun bursting out with multiple different interpretations of any given topic, 90% of them subtlety wrong. Very few have anything original to say. They pad their ten minute timer with history, use youtube's suggested topics and only 1-2 minutes of the episode covers what you want, and usually from such a limited perspective that the little details will still trip you up. For every Ben Eater, there's thousands of poorly aimed videos that clog up your brainspace.
There's also people deliberately misrepresenting knowledge for clicks & selling products. Micheal Crichton was right not to be concerned about the fall of journalism. He said (to effect) anybody can write whatever they want. The value is in the edited content. Which he meant by mainstream, validated press agencies that used to control most intepretation. The concept still applies, most of youtube will not be missed.
Neither do TV or movies for the most part; there are many examples of high art in those formats but the most popular examples thereof are hardly at all intellectually gratifying, educational, or otherwise "helpful", as you put it (a good descriptor). It's entertainment - it's there for fun, and in many cases, it's there for the sake of art. (That's not to say that e.g. popcorn flicks don't have any artistic qualities, just that they're aiming for the former, not the latter.) The issue is more in the ways that YouTube tries to keep you watching, like the other massive social media sites.
No one else, ever, has had a platform where an independent video creator could start with a handful of viewers and build up to millions, and even potentially make a career out of it. No, it's not common, there's a ton of work involved with no immediate payout, and it requires at least a bit of luck with the dreaded "algorithm", but it's probably more merit-based than what we had before, and that's a wonderful thing.
(I'm not entirely certain about that last bit, hence "probably". How merit-based was/is TV and film, precisely? I just find it hard to believe that they're better than YouTube, given the quantity of quality creators on it who could never find a slot, much less an audience, on any other platform or format that has ever been.)
With regard to the ubiquity: given the lack of competitors, apparently the capital requirements are so high and the lock-in effects so strong that there aren't any companies willing to give it a go. The closest thing we have, Twitch, filled a niche that YouTube wasn't technically capable of at the time, grew large enough before YouTube decided to try to enter that market so Twitch was able to acquire those same lock-in effects, and was bought by Amazon who provides the capital to ensure a smooth experience (Twitch prior to the acquisition was far more prone to performance issues).
> I wonder where the time would have went if we were not enterprising enough to invent big data and portable streams and engagement metrics.
Do remember channel surfing on your dumb, terrestrial, flow TV? Hours spend clicking "next channel" on the remote, cycling the same 5-10 channels, passing by the same program, again and again.
Downdetector seems like a great place to advertise. You have a bunch of people who were forced to abandon the provider of whatever type of service that your company may offer. What a great opportunity to show customers your competing product.
I have a 2-hour-long YouTube video still open, it's continuing to load as I continue to watch it without issues, but new videos aren't working. That's an interesting clue: the CDN isn't down as some people are implying.
Edit 45 min later: Everything appears to be working again, including YouTube TV.
On the technology side, I think we're pretty close to the point where small startups can create video hosting platforms. For low traffic, running them through ffmpeg and dropping a <video> tag works pretty well. For higher traffic, I think something like BunnyCDN can be used for a reasonable cost.
But the technology isn't the problem. The problem is nobody is going to use your platform. We need to decouple discovery from hosting. We need a slick, simple aggregator that lets people submit video URLs from multiple platforms, then handles recommendations. If your video has an equal chance of blowing up regardless of where it's hosted, it opens the door for competition with YouTube.
doing a `curl -v https://redirector.googlevideo.com` (the host you'll connect to before getting redirected to the actual mp4/m4a streams) opens a tls connection (and gives a cert), but it then hangs for two minutes, before returning a 502.
i'd wager some database storing info about the streams crashed :^D (given that it also crashes on /, it's more likely something else)
I remember hearing something like Google Global Cache proxies requests to Google datacenters so that retransmit times, due to last mile issues, are lower since packets do not need to travel all the way to the datacenter. My guess is that they might do HTTP TLS termination there, and when the backend failed to respond in time returned 502.
and now youtube.com/get_video_info, the undocumented endpoint for querying (among other things) streaming urls, is broken as well. returns "Video ID is invalid." or "An error occurred. Please try again later."
I think it's just because Downdetector is getting tons of traffic which makes it think people are having more issues than usual with virtually everything. I haven't heard any actual people say Spotify, Twitter, or Twitch are down.
And we know that it isn't flat throughout the day. I imagine this is probably peak earning time for them, assuming they bulk of the revenue is US based.
Look at the charts on downdetector homepage - multiple major sites all got hit by something simultaneously and are all trending back down almost identically.
Seems like just the video player is down - homepage loads with thumbnails, and when you click on a video, everything but the video player renders. What I find interesting is that scrolling through a video still displays closed captions and even the thumbnail preview of the timestamp you're hovering over. Curious if anyone know what causes something like this?
Captions and thumbnails come from a different part of the CDN. Same with Netflix. The videos come from devices dedicated to large files, the captions and thumbnails come from a CDN designed for small files.
Same here in socal, and look at those DownDetector report numbers[0]. Baseline 30, now almost 200,000 reports. I wonder what could be going on to cause this level of global service degradation.
Perhaps related, I uploaded a video earlier today that took nearly 4 hours to process, though it was only ten minutes long.
"We're so sorry for the interruption. This is fixed across all devices & YouTube services," YouTube said in a tweet https://bit.ly/36r4sjz, without explaining what had caused the outage.
Google did not respond to a Reuters request for comment on the outage.
Sorry... I think I broke YouTube when I converted my Google Music account over to YT. Happened at the exact same time! /s (but really at the same time)
Our opinions and wish lists don’t matter. Content creators make money from being on YouTube. If you want to create an actual alternative, be ready to subsidize the income of a couple thousand content creators to the level that they can afford lambos. Then maybe you can create a competitor. Maybe. Because the step after that is to throw money at global infrastructure and still somehow make a profit.
Although I sometime upload things to YouTube, I'm primarily a YouTube viewer. Nevertheless, I think that the greatest strength of YouTube is the ease of uploading content. So many people have uploaded so much material on so many topics that just about anything you might want to learn about or enjoy is likely to be covered well on YouTube.
Many people have pointed out issues with recommendation algorithms, both on YouTube and elsewhere—particularly the “falling down the rabbit hole” phenomenon of getting deeper and deeper into conspiracy theories. I generally stay away from politics on YouTube, though, and most of my recommendations are actually quite helpful: good videos on topics that I’ve been viewing recently or have searched for.
So, for me at least, alternatives to YouTube would have to have those two features at a minimum: seamless uploading with few restrictions, and good recommendations. Whether that would be feasible commercially I have no idea.
Oh, one more thing: Hire the HN guys to design the moderation system for the new service's comments. YouTube comments are, in general, horrible.
I was trying to load a workout video, and it worked on my phone but I wanted to cast it to my TV. I turned off/on my router and Wi-Fi, reset chromecast, restart the phone, restarted the laptop. I was about to just try to do it from my laptop, did a quick survey of the home network, and then the TV started working again. Haha my workout was delayed about 20 or 30 minutes
[+] [-] nonbirithm|5 years ago|reply
It's a strange feeling to be alive just after all of the significant technology companies were created and started to gain traction. YouTube has only existed for fifteen years, but it might continue to exist for centuries. The demand that has arisen in people to watch videos online is probably not reversible so long as maintaining a video streaming service is still physically possible. If not YouTube, something else would probably fill in such a void if it ever appears, barring the Apocalypse.
It gives me a lot of conflicting feelings. Twenty years ago, few people would have known they wanted the unique content that YouTube offered that wasn't available at the time, like livestreamers or swathes of content about every single plane crash or minor video game mechanic that can be talked about. But now, thousands have become hooked on them. I can't remember the details, only that I've watched them at some point. I wonder where the time would have went if we were not enterprising enough to invent big data and portable streams and engagement metrics. And for me personally, I can say that I "like" a lot of content, but I'm reasonably certain that's the kind of thing some portion of drug addicts would say about their habits. Not much of it actually helps me.
[+] [-] eat_veggies|5 years ago|reply
Second, the good old days of "before" we were enterprising enough to invent big data etc. is retroactively constituted, and not apparent until its demise. Before YouTube it was television and radio, magazines and books, and even writing itself. On the technology of writing, Plato said "They will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks."
These constructions create the appearance of the industry's indestructibility -- certain consequences (the before, the help, or the livelihoods or subcultures you mention) are taken to axiomatic or self-evident, creating a logical construction that is bulletproof in its circular vacuousness. YouTube will die, just as websites before it have died, and technologies before it have died. What comes next might be better or worse.
That is to say, just enjoy your videos if they make you happy.
[+] [-] dorkwood|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] trentdk|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] friendlybus|5 years ago|reply
There's also people deliberately misrepresenting knowledge for clicks & selling products. Micheal Crichton was right not to be concerned about the fall of journalism. He said (to effect) anybody can write whatever they want. The value is in the edited content. Which he meant by mainstream, validated press agencies that used to control most intepretation. The concept still applies, most of youtube will not be missed.
[+] [-] Fej|5 years ago|reply
Neither do TV or movies for the most part; there are many examples of high art in those formats but the most popular examples thereof are hardly at all intellectually gratifying, educational, or otherwise "helpful", as you put it (a good descriptor). It's entertainment - it's there for fun, and in many cases, it's there for the sake of art. (That's not to say that e.g. popcorn flicks don't have any artistic qualities, just that they're aiming for the former, not the latter.) The issue is more in the ways that YouTube tries to keep you watching, like the other massive social media sites.
No one else, ever, has had a platform where an independent video creator could start with a handful of viewers and build up to millions, and even potentially make a career out of it. No, it's not common, there's a ton of work involved with no immediate payout, and it requires at least a bit of luck with the dreaded "algorithm", but it's probably more merit-based than what we had before, and that's a wonderful thing.
(I'm not entirely certain about that last bit, hence "probably". How merit-based was/is TV and film, precisely? I just find it hard to believe that they're better than YouTube, given the quantity of quality creators on it who could never find a slot, much less an audience, on any other platform or format that has ever been.)
With regard to the ubiquity: given the lack of competitors, apparently the capital requirements are so high and the lock-in effects so strong that there aren't any companies willing to give it a go. The closest thing we have, Twitch, filled a niche that YouTube wasn't technically capable of at the time, grew large enough before YouTube decided to try to enter that market so Twitch was able to acquire those same lock-in effects, and was bought by Amazon who provides the capital to ensure a smooth experience (Twitch prior to the acquisition was far more prone to performance issues).
[+] [-] wodenokoto|5 years ago|reply
Do remember channel surfing on your dumb, terrestrial, flow TV? Hours spend clicking "next channel" on the remote, cycling the same 5-10 channels, passing by the same program, again and again.
That's where the time would have gone.
[+] [-] birdyrooster|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] herpderperator|5 years ago|reply
Edit 45 min later: Everything appears to be working again, including YouTube TV.
[+] [-] jacekm|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] StavrosK|5 years ago|reply
https://imgz.org/igMu9iLo
[+] [-] anderspitman|5 years ago|reply
But the technology isn't the problem. The problem is nobody is going to use your platform. We need to decouple discovery from hosting. We need a slick, simple aggregator that lets people submit video URLs from multiple platforms, then handles recommendations. If your video has an equal chance of blowing up regardless of where it's hosted, it opens the door for competition with YouTube.
[+] [-] girst|5 years ago|reply
i'd wager some database storing info about the streams crashed :^D (given that it also crashes on /, it's more likely something else)
[+] [-] birdyrooster|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] steveseguin|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] girst|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yreg|5 years ago|reply
What’s going on?
[+] [-] TrackerFF|5 years ago|reply
edit: I assumed you meant more in general over the past weeks or months, not right now - if that's the case.
But those are indeed some interesting patterns, that so many websites are getting the same spikes.
[+] [-] resfirestar|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jtchang|5 years ago|reply
> YouTube ads generated $15.15 billion in revenue in fiscal year 2019.
So plugged into wolfram alpha:
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/? i=15.15+billion+dollars+per+number+of+seconds+in+a+year
They lose about $480 per second or $1.7MM per hour. Yikes.
[+] [-] jedberg|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drilldrive|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] soheil|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] croes|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adamtulinius|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wongarsu|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] christoph|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jameshe|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jedberg|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rasz|5 years ago|reply
videos however come from redirector.googlevideo.com/videoplayback
[+] [-] sebmellen|5 years ago|reply
Perhaps related, I uploaded a video earlier today that took nearly 4 hours to process, though it was only ten minutes long.
[0]: https://downdetector.com/status/youtube/
[+] [-] dredmorbius|5 years ago|reply
"We're so sorry for the interruption. This is fixed across all devices & YouTube services," YouTube said in a tweet https://bit.ly/36r4sjz, without explaining what had caused the outage.
Google did not respond to a Reuters request for comment on the outage.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-youtube-outages/youtube-b...
YouTube's tweet: https://nitter.net/TeamYouTube/status/1326709701526974464
[+] [-] vxxzy|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] soheil|5 years ago|reply
Would love your opinions/wish list/must haves.
[+] [-] lovehashbrowns|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tkgally|5 years ago|reply
Many people have pointed out issues with recommendation algorithms, both on YouTube and elsewhere—particularly the “falling down the rabbit hole” phenomenon of getting deeper and deeper into conspiracy theories. I generally stay away from politics on YouTube, though, and most of my recommendations are actually quite helpful: good videos on topics that I’ve been viewing recently or have searched for.
So, for me at least, alternatives to YouTube would have to have those two features at a minimum: seamless uploading with few restrictions, and good recommendations. Whether that would be feasible commercially I have no idea.
Oh, one more thing: Hire the HN guys to design the moderation system for the new service's comments. YouTube comments are, in general, horrible.
[+] [-] brewdad|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Mountain_Skies|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arielweisberg|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bluedino|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dvduval|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ATsch|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] toast0|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rajamaka|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacobwilliamroy|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] monatron|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] justicezyx|5 years ago|reply
Usually this type of site-wide outage is always related to networking.
BGP, not sure. Google practices SDN. So their software error can rekt a large chunk of infrastructure...
[+] [-] dmingod666|5 years ago|reply
I'd want to know what caused this. I'm guessing they're running on kubernetes, but it too early to tell what actually must have failed..
clearly there are points of failure and not sufficient backups to that point of failure..
[+] [-] aflag|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Xorlev|5 years ago|reply