It’s not just you: YouTube was inaccessible for an extended period of time Tuesday evening, across both apps and its regular desktop site.
The Google-owned dystopian video service acknowledged the outage on Twitter, which as of hitting the Publish button had been going on for over an hour around the world:
https://twitter.com/TeamYouTube/status/1052373937839980544
Update 7:41pm: YouTube appeared to recover for many users on both the web and mobile apps, although the company has yet to release information about the outage.
Update 8:00pm: The crisis has been officially averted.
https://twitter.com/TeamYouTube/status/1052393799815589889
It’s hard to know what to do in these situations. Panic seems like the most likely course of action, but don’t despair: the internet offers many other entertainment options to distract yourself from real life.
As usual, Twitter provided the comic relief while we all struggled without our mysteriously chosen algorithmic entertainment, which is designed to get us more and more riled up about politics and video games, among other things.
https://twitter.com/ibogost/status/1052379415299182593
https://twitter.com/brianstelter/status/1052379688344190977
https://twitter.com/ElvisChaleckas/status/1052380593953153025
https://twitter.com/grigiobey/status/1052381924411486213
[Editor’s note: This post was updated after the internet gods brought YouTube back to us.]