YouTube yet to explain why it was down for hours

Popular online video streaming website YouTube has yet to explain the reasons behind the broadcasting issues that affected access to the site’s services in the early morning hours of October 17.

According to media reports around the world, problems with streaming videos on YouTube began to be noticed by users at around 4:30am Kenyan time. YouTube acknowledged the outage with a tweet on their official Twitter page at 4:41am. At 6.00am, the video-sharing website said its services were back working.

Of the affected services, according to the tweets by the online streaming service, were YouTube, YouTube Music and YouTube TV.

We're back! Thanks for all of your patience. If you continue to experience issues, please let us know. https://t.co/NVU5GP7Sy6

— TeamYouTube (@TeamYouTube) October 17, 2018

Users in Kenya, and Africa in general, do not seem to have experienced the outage. According to CNBC, a map on DownDetector, which tracks status information and outages for various types of services in real time, showed that users in the United States, Brazil, Japan, parts of Australia, Southeast Asia and Western Europe were affected.

When contacted for questions relating to the seemingly system breakdown, CNBC and Britain’s The Guardian were referred to the YouTube tweets, with the American media company reporting that a spokesperson for the online video-sharing giant said the company had nothing else to share at the moment.

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According to American tech site The Verge,  this is not the first time that YouTube has been down this year.

In July during a World Cup semi-final game between Croatia and England, the company’s pay tv streaming site YouTube TV suffered an outage. When the service which provides live sports went down, England were leading 1-0.

Subscribers who pay around Ksh4,000 a month for the service ended up missing out on Croatia’s equaliser. YouTube TV however was back in time for users to see extra-time where Croatia scored to book a place to the final.

Another outage occurred in early April when YouTube’s channel pages were offline for over four hours.

Thanks for your patience, the 500 error is now fixed! https://t.co/9ooRVS9sh8

— TeamYouTube (@TeamYouTube) April 2, 2018

Users trying to access the channel messages were met with an internal server error and a message saying, “Sorry, something went wrong. A team of highly trained monkeys has been dispatched to deal with this situation.”

On all the occasions, YouTube restored its services without offering further details as to what the cause of the problem was.

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