Interestingly, my youtube-dl archiving script is still chugging along with only a handful of elevated retry rates. So whatever the problem is, it's probably not at the API or CDN layers.
The static contents are still available so it must be problem in their application. Strange that is down world wide, not a region. But, then Google likes to make things as a whole, ie. Spanner database.
I was able to finish watching a video on my phone, and it definitely hadn't buffered all of it yet, so some servers must still be able to handle requests for videos.
YT generates resource links with ~couple of hours expiry dates, once generated page/app will keep reusing that link.
isn't it also strange that the shadow of their ui components are still loading?
Not really, this is done client-side.
They're generic templates to make you think the page is loading faster than it is. They don't represent the content that eventually (normally) shows up.
Both m.youtube.com & the mobile app are down.
Along with their live TV product, tv.youtube.com
SMTube (aka http://tonvid.com/) failed[0] due to "(500) Backend Error"...