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Comment by sarim | Hacker News Reader

I have never seen Youtube not work. Ever. This is a special moment. Glad you are all here to share it with me :)

In the early days it went down all the time. Same with all of their competitors. The YouTube engineers had a Python+Mysql+lighttpd stack and even had a fork of lighttp for faster performance. They spent every day eliminating bottlenecks until it was stable and then Google bought them.

The original talk about their stack was on Google Videos back in the day. Now sure if it got moved to the YouBoobs.

I don't remember the exact timeline of YouTube's growth, but I think during the time period when it was the most popular site for pirated TV shows, it was really stable and has been ever since.

I totally forgot google video was a thing.

Heh so did i! That was a weird feeling...

It's still Python+MySQL for what I can tell. But also has parts in Go (see i.e. their work on vitess to scale MySQL access https://vitess.io/ )

They now run their python code using a transpiler into Go with a Go runtime and Go libraries: https://github.com/google/grumpy

Reminds me about Facebook, who transpiled PHP to C++. Before creating their HHVM interpreter and their hack language.

This is not true. Grumpy exists, but it is mostly unmaintained now, and certainly isn't capable of transpiling all of youtube.

I am proud to say that in 2008 my country knocked this puny website off the interwebs in a bid to censor it within the country. They accidentally hijacked the global IP addresses[0]

I am also proud to say that my country left the domain for their original Internet Exchange Point[1] unregistered. Guess who scooped it up?

PS. My country is Pakistan.

[0]: https://www.cnet.com/news/how-pakistan-knocked-youtube-offli...

[1]: https://pie.net.pk

Great work sir!

> Guess who scooped it up?

This is the best domain squatting I've seen.

I have a new hero.

I was going to link to the video of a Dyn employee (Todd whatshisname) doing a parody of American Pie about this -- "The Day The Youtube Died" -- but the only link I have to the video is on Youtube. :/

Here are the lyrics [0] instead, you'll just have to sing it to yourself.

[0]: https://dyn.com/blog/the-day-the-youtube-died-1/

Well everyone here seems mighty proud of censorship. Its too bad when Google themselves want to do it in China everyone loses their shit!

I guess the sarcasm in my original post wasn't obvious enough. But, yes، that was sarcasm۔

I'm also suing the Pakistani Federal Government to hand over a list of censored internet resources as part of a FOIA request. The hearing is tomorrow [0], wish me luck!

[0]: https://link.medium.com/RkevqMKY4Q

It actually makes me appreciate how reliable youtube has always been. I never even consider a youtube link might not work perfectly when I click one.

Internet sites go down all the time, though usually not for long or en masse.

Makes a good case for self-hosting videos as a backup

Or a good case for keeping one or two physical paper books on a bookshelf, and maybe a candle and lighter.

I don't think yt being down is a signal for the end of times

Never seen Youtube go down on their end. But I have seen it stop working on dozens of workstations at a news site simultaneously when they dropped ie7 support.

Magically this enabled the outsourced infrastructure provider to roll out a new default browser quite a bit faster than they previously claimed they can...

Google sites are probably the most reliable, I don't think I've ever seen google / gmail / yt going down.

I think a Google search outage would be a spectacular train wreck.

Imagine if Google's search was compromised in such a way as to be has bad as the Sony PSN network hack of ..2011? Imagine not having Google search for several weeks. Bing/DuckDuckGo/Yahoo would struggle just to keep up and people would immediately realize their dependence on the big G.

> I think a Google search outage would be a spectacular train wreck.

I'd argue that a youtube outage is worse. If google search is out, you can just use duckduckgo.

If you want to watch a video on youtube, you're SOL.

This is speaking from experience with blacklisting both google.com and youtube.com in my hosts file. I was doing fine with blacklisting google, but couldn't handle blacklisting youtube.

Try it yourself if you don't believe me.

Youtube is mostly idle entertainment though so an hour of no youtube is not the end of the world but people rely on search engines to get stuff done.

I have seen gmail go down many times years ago but I haven't used the web interface for years so I don't know how often it happens nowadays...

It depends how you define "going down." Here's an old screenshot of mine of when Google Search failed spectacularly by marking every single link as malicious and therefore not taking the user to that site when you click the link [1] [2]. Perhaps that might qualify as going down, although clearly it didn't go down at the network level.

It remained broken (in that way) for quite some time (maybe longer than an hour.) But, happening in 2009, I can't accurately recall.

Here is another scenario when Google Search failed to successfully serve my query [3].

And an early time when YouTube went down [4].

[1] https://i.imgur.com/X05BCpI.png [2] https://i.imgur.com/CaDh1Y6.png [3] https://i.imgur.com/VZI4Yew.png [4] https://i.imgur.com/bPTp4bg.png

As someone who ran a channel with a few thousand subscribers for a year or two, I’ve seen my fair share of 500 error pages on YouTube. Granted, it was always isolated and may recover after a few refreshes (IIRC), but still.

I agree, but a special moment because these days there are people like you that never had to see "big" sites crashing or dial-up speeds.

Going on over an hour now. Someone goofed big time.

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