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Ask HN: YouTube down?

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Re: Ask HN: YouTube down?

#323

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.

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.

Re: Ask HN: YouTube down?

#324
post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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.

Re: Ask HN: YouTube down?

#325

Medium sized regional AS here: I am looking at a fairly large drop in IX traffic charts for our ports that face the IX, updated every 60s, which directly corresponds in time with the beginning of the Youtube outage. (We are not big enough to have a direct, dedicated peering session with the Google/Youtube AS). At any given time of day 4pm-11pm a huge percent of our traffic is Youtube (or netflix, or amazon video, or…

IX?

I'm guessing it stands for Internet eXchange?

Re: Ask HN: YouTube down?

#327
post #317

This seems to be GCP related. I know the status page is all green currently... but we have a lot of services using GCP products and some are failing and showing increased latency. Pubsub failures as well.

YouTube is not built on GCP.

Re: Ask HN: YouTube down?

#329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.
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