On Tuesday afternoon around 5pm Pacific time I had wrapped up laptop work and was going to watch YouTube on my phone.
As some of you know, I couldn’t.
I saw other posts on LinkedIn that also reported on outage, as well as other online accounts from foreign and domestic sources. I shared some of these on my Bredemarket Technology Firm Services LinkedIn page.
However, the only news from these sources was that hundreds of thousands of people were reporting the issue to Downdetector.
However, the site wasn’t COMPLETELY down. If you had a direct link to a YouTube video, you could still watch it. I confirmed this by watching the YouTube version of one of my Bredemarket promotional videos.
Then, a little over an hour later, YouTube was fully operational again.
After the fact, Google revealed the cause:
“An issue with our recommendations system prevented videos from appearing across surfaces on YouTube (including the homepage, the YouTube app, YouTube Music and YouTube Kids).”
Since recommendations appear almost everywhere, just about everything was affected. Because YouTube, like most other social services, can’t just show “the site”; it has to show what it thinks you should see.
Think about it. What would YouTube look like if it couldn’t recommend anything?
Now we know.
Bredemarket 