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Comment by corodra | Hacker News Reader

Are we going to start a betting pool as to why?

I put $20 on DDoS, but I'm hedging $5 that someone spilled their drink on something important and quickly got out of there before anyone noticed.

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Wouldn't DDoS be incredibly hard to pull off given YouTubes vast resources? I mean they generate so much traffic all the time and serve so many requests a second I don't know if botnets of that size exist. Anyone here more knowledgeable?

Would it involve hitting whoever/whatever handles their DNS like that one attack about a year ago?

FYI: I legit am retarded to such things and my networking knowledge is...meh. So please correct me.

DNS is resolving because people can get to the site. Because of the distributed nature of YouTube's resources (at DNS as well as other layers), it's very unlikely to be DDoS related. Static content loads, but video content doesn't. Seems like an application error, or a problem with media streaming infrastructure.

Yeah i feel like a DDoS that big would be afecting other google services right now...

Maybe it's a brain teaser - if you can answer how to DDoS Youtube, they'll call you up for an interview.

I could tell you a few ways, but would never work for them out of principle. They can find their own bugs.

I suppose if you had something new and incredibly powerful, this would be a great way to show it off.

Still more likely that YT just made an oopsie.

A few hundred AI learning instances were started to train on youtube videos to "understand" humanity. They have become self aware and started to consume double amount of CPU/GPU/Disk/RAM/Network resource every few seconds - a skynet/super nova moment.

> I put $20 on DDoS

I'd take you on that, except I have no anonymized payment account. Otherwise, I'd bet $100 that it's not.

Only Google has the scale to DDoS Google.

Hey! Conspiracy time!

Maybe it's an inner splinter rogue group within Google that's been secretly hating on a Youtube team and decided to get the ultimate payback for like... not inviting them to a lan party...or something...aliens ate all the cheesey poofs.

It's crab people for sure.

I'm not saying it's aliens, but...

It's the sunspot thing. They took down the Hubble, that other telescope, that random lab, and now the frog people Alex Jones warned us about are coming to inject you with the gay and ship you on a raft made out of Michael Moore to Cuba.

All to conceal the real truth about what happened on 9/11 and how it connects to the plot to obfuscate what really happened at Pearl Harbor and how the Australian mafia actually had JFK assassinated to cover up the truth about Marilyn Monroe, Tupac, and Charles Proteus Steinmetz. A clever scheme, no doubt orchestrated by the evil consortium of George Westinghouse, Thomas Edison and Guglielmo Marconi. Hopefully Elon Musk, Robert Downey Jr. and Nikola Tesla will be able to bring the truth to light!

You forgot George Soros

Conspiracy theory time.

The DDoS came from inside the Google servers!

Now see, that I'd believe.

Maybe. Netflix is on the same order of magnitude. China has many websites whose volume is not much smaller than google.

I bet it’s a core network issue since it went down globally at the same time.. they deploy new binaries slowly so that shouldn’t cause it. Maybe some config was changed without testing?

A. You're not being fun.

2. Good point.

III. One thing I did notice. I had some other videos in other tabs. They still loaded through. I could skip around and it streamed in video like nothing was wrong. When I refresh, bust.

Quatre: Five......

Agreed. I'd suspect it'll be something similar to Google's 2016 GCP outage:

https://status.cloud.google.com/incident/compute/16007

(I'm thinking something like router firmware or BGP).

i think that if this is the case, it's an fast and easy fix, but they haven't solved yet so i think this is not the issue

Is it down globally? I've has some EU people on Mastodon say it's still up for them.

My vote: Bad configuration got pushed.

I thought they had all sorts of crazy canary deployment processes that will automatically stop/rollback the deployment if the failure metrics start increasing?

Ran out of canaries?

Well, could be an unforeseeable-wack-crazy-bug. Can't plan for every possible failure.

That's very true, there's always a bug somewhere lurking, even if you're Google.

There was a GCP Global network outage maybe a year or two ago, where their canary of a canary (Yo dawg, I heard you like bugs, so I I put a but inside of your bug) caused a cascading network failure.

It was a bad config push -- brownouts fighting with brown outs. Consistency issues. I bet this is happening.

The janitor needed that socket to plug the vacuum

Experimental Roomba built up a static charge and fried something important.

DNS, it is always DNS.

Metadata querying I imagine. The search was working, buffered videos and main site were loading, just not displaying videos. (so not network)

Fat fingered a script would be my guess. Not the first time that caused a 'big4' site to go down.

Somebody probably accidentally powered down the Web:

https://home.cern/about/updates/2012/12/month-1991-web-sprea...

I'm betting it has to do with video indexation.

I was watching a long video just fine, then I searched for something else and clicked on one result. Error message.

Joe, the only YouTube support person in the office this evening, accidentally hit the pause button on the YouTube service in his admin console before stepping out for a long bathroom break. Hey, it could happen...

I bet on Google Global Cache problem.

YouTube was down for me through my residential ISP (which no doubt has internal caching via GGC) but through VPN was fine.

The Saudis dont like all the attention?

My bet is data loss. Some engineer deleted MySQL table accidentally and they found out their backups are not working.

$20 says it was Greg. Again!

I'll take your $20 bet and raise you to $100. Not a DDoS.

NSA was installing a wire tap and sliced some fiber.

That would not cause a global outage. YouTube has caches in all the major ISPs.

maybe nsa was installing a whole bunch of wire taps?

With the help of aliens since they have a better vantage point of where all the cables are... because, you know, the Earth is fla-... nope. Can't do it. I can't go that far. I can only say "so much" stupid. That's too far.

My bet is rm -f instead of cp -R.

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