YouTube Sparks Global Outrage After Streaming Service Went Down Due to 500 Internal Server Error

YouTube is experiencing a downtime that is extremely rare for the video-streaming service. As of this writing, the reason for the downtime has yet to be released but YouTube itself said it’s working on the problem at the moment, The Verge reported.

The Twitter handle of the streaming service acknowledged the issue at 8:40 p.m. A few hours after the tweet was posted, the site is still down, sparking global outrage as it turns out that users all over the world are experiencing the issue. While this problem is a rare one for YouTube, it’s the third time that it occurred this year alone.

What’s more, the two previous issues happened during a popular sporting event. In May, users took to social media to voice their frustration when YouTube was down during the NBA Eastern Conference Finals. Two months later, the same issue occurred when England and Croatia were battling it out during the World Cup.

Aside from the main YouTube site, several services of the streaming platform are also affected, including Youtube TV and YouTube Music. Similar to the previous problems that the site had this year, the same “500 Internal Server Error” is displayed on the page whenever YouTube is used in any other browser.

“Thanks for your reports about YouTube, YouTube TV, and YouTube Music access issues. We’re working on resolving this and will let you know once fixed. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and will keep you updated,” YouTube wrote on Twitter.

It’s still unknown what is causing the error, although there are precedents that may shed some light on the matter. In 2008, YouTube was down for two-thirds of global users when the Pakistani government attempted to domestically censor a trailer for an anti-Islamic film.

As of now, the site has yet to announce what exactly is the root of the problem.