YouTube Back After Outage

It's been a rough couple of days for uptime at the world's most popular sites. This morning YouTube was down for several hours, and Google has yet to issue an incident report. The downtime for the web's leading video hub follows an outage yesterday for Wikipedia.

Many users visiting YouTube were greeted with an “Http/1.1 Service Unavailable” error message or a 500 Internal Server Error. Videos embedded in third-party sites apparently continued to work just fine. "YouTube experienced a technical issue this morning," YouTube reported, using its Twitter feed to state the obvious. "Our engineers worked to fix it and the site is back to normal."

Last fall YouTube announced that it is serving more than 1 billion page views a day. That works out to 11,574 page views per second, and means that YouTube serves up a million page views about every 90 seconds. So a two-hour outage might equate to 83 million page views - real traffic to most folks, but a busy morning at Google.

Last February 2008 YouTube was knocked offline for two hours when Pakistan Telecom inadvertantly claimed its IP addresses.