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:
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.
— Team YouTube (@TeamYouTube) October 17, 2018
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.
We're back! Thanks for all of your patience. If you continue to experience issues, please let us know. https://t.co/NVU5GP7Sy6
— Team YouTube (@TeamYouTube) October 17, 2018
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.
YouTube is not down. It’s molting. Soon it will emerge, having sloughed off and discarded its spent, silvery-grey outer husk, ready to grown into an even more powerful invertebrate.
— Ian Bogost (@ibogost) October 17, 2018
What YouTube's outage looks like on my laptop pic.twitter.com/k02iNnpbkd
— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) October 17, 2018
Youtube might be down, but this video should keep you company until it comes back up pic.twitter.com/TuLTCNbafK
— Elvis Chaleckas (@ElvisChaleckas) October 17, 2018
Me leaving my room for the first time in days to socialize since YouTube is down pic.twitter.com/dk1DncurDL
— we- (@grigiobey) October 17, 2018
[Editor’s note: This post was updated after the internet gods brought YouTube back to us.]