YouTube was down. Here’s what to do if you’re still having issues
Tuesday’s evening routine of watching funny outtake videos, clips of people unboxing toys or early ’90s British science shows, were interrupted for users of the massively popular site YouTube.
The internet outpost with billions of videos, second in Alexa internet rankings only to parent site Google, suffered a serious outage for several minutes beginning around 6:30 p.m. Pacific time. It was officially announced on Twitter through YouTube’s official channel, @TeamYouTube, at 6:43 p.m.
By 8 p.m. Pacific time, however, YouTube said the site was up and running again: “We’re back! Thanks for all of your patience. If you continue to experience issues, please let us know.”
On Twitter, the worldwide top trending hashtag at 8 p.m. was #YOUTUBEDOWN, indicating how far-reaching the inconvenience was for users.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Thanks for your reports about YouTube, YouTube TV and YouTube Music access issues. We're working on resolving this and will let you know once fixed. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and will keep you updated.</p>— Team YouTube (@TeamYouTube) <a href="https://twitter.com/TeamYouTube/status/1052373937839980544?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">October 17, 2018</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
Some users reported “Error 500” or “Error 503,” which are indications of a server error or a service that is unavailable, respectively. Google, which itself is owned by Mountain View-based Alphabet, has servers for YouTube’s content distribution worldwide.
Plenty of social media users around Sacramento took to places like Twitter to vent their frustration.
For those who are still having trouble connecting to the site, one soltion would be to perform a “force refresh,” which clears the site’s recent cache.
In Google Chrome, for example, users can hold their computer’s Ctrl button and click the reload icon. One could also hold Ctrl and F5 at the same time.
This story was originally published October 16, 2018 at 7:37 PM.