(fire crackling)
(long beep)
(heavy breathing)
- I'm still alive.
YouTube still exists.
- [Male Voiceover] vidIQ. - [Female Voiceover] vidIQ.
- [Male Voiceover] vidIQ.com.
(upbeat music) - On October the 16th, 2018,
at approximately 6:20 Pacific Standard Time,
media outlets started to report that YouTube,
you know, the thing that you're watching this very video on,
went down for what seems like all
of its near two billion monthly users.
Now, a lot of you were actually asleep when it happened,
and it lasted for barely an hour.
But for a fraction of the time, it dominated social media,
and it raised some fascinating questions.
First of all, what happened?
How did we all react?
How should this concern you?
And were there any silver linings to what happened?
So, I want to open the floor up to you folks.
What do you think happened to YouTube?
Hello to all of you watching right now,
and hello to all of our awesome vidIQ community
who post every single day on our YouTube channel.
My name is Rob.
If this is your first time in these glorious
and working again YouTube surroundings,
we are the YouTube tool and channel
that aims to help you get more views in less time
by educating you on your YouTube journey.
We do have a awesome Chrome extension
that will give you all sorts of analytics
to help you grow your channel.
There is a link in the description,
and it is free to download.
But the talk of the town today is why YouTube went down.
Are there any answers?
Hmmm.
Well, for the 70 million followers
of YouTube's Twitter feed,
all you discovered in the aftermath of the outage
was the return of Lucas the Spider.
As for the Team YouTube Twitter feed,
you know the one, you're all badgering them
to sort out your monetization problems,
they did acknowledge the outage,
but didn't tell us anything else until it had been fixed.
YouTube's product forums didn't have any official statement
other than the issue had been escalated,
and a search on Google revealed nothing beyond all of
the original news stories that YouTube had gone down,
but was now fully back up and running.
So unless somebody's suppressing the news,
and who's gonna do that?
- [Trump Voiceover] Fake news.
- Nobody outside YouTube HQ really has a clue what happened.
Although, there is a clue and it comes in the form
of this cheeky purple monkey.
It's a classic YouTube error page
that I'm sure you've all encountered
at some point whilst using YouTube,
and it usually refers to an internal server error.
YouTube say they have a team of these,
they are highly trained,
and they must have been working overtime
to get everything fixed within the hour.
So in the absence of concrete information from the source,
what YouTube have done (bell dings)
is created a news vacuum.
And you know what fills one of those?
Conspiracy theories.
(clearing throat)
Let's hope I don't get a corporate strike for this.
(whistles X-Files theme)
The biggest conspiracy theory suggests
that somebody uploaded a video of something impacting
on the moon that needed covering up.
I can tell you, it's definitely not this video, however,
as it was uploaded in February 2017.
But what on earth is that? (groans)
As you might expect, several hacking organizations
have claimed responsibility, including Project Zorgo,
who have quite a reputation when it comes to YouTube.
(dramatic ambient music)
[Narrator Voiceover] Yesterday, in preparation for
the Doomsday Date, we decided to test
the code we have written.
We managed to take YouTube offline for over an hour.
Attempted--
- The channel has over 300 thousand subscribers,
and they already claimed to have taken over
the YouTube Trending page in the past,
and hang on just a minute--
(warping static) Are they using vidIQ?
(dramatic horn)
Now this leads me to one of two conclusions.
Either we're partially responsible for bringing down
the whole of YouTube,
in which case we profusely apologize for that,
or we're firmly in Project Zorgo's crosshairs.
(gunshot fires)
Another theory is that YouTube implemented
some huge AI update, but that wouldn't explain
the global outage that we all suffered.
The truth is, YouTube don't need
to hang their dirty washing out in public,
so we may never know what happened
for that one single hour that YouTube was down.
You have to remember that the vast majority
of both video creators (bell dings)
and YouTube viewers pay not a single penny for the service.
But there are those who use YouTube Music,
YouTube Premium, YouTube TV, who are going
to need some sort of refund for
that one hour YouTube was down.
And now let's take some highlights
from how we all reacted to YouTube going down.
That means going to Twitter.
(upbeat music)
- I think the best thing would be to start with a job.
- No, no. - [Dr. Phil] Yeah, absolutely,
she needs a job. - No! (crying)
(upbeat music)
- Yeah, I think this last one might just be my favorite.
All right, let's get down to a bit of business.
In the aftermath, how has YouTube's outage affected you?
First of all, from a viewer's perspective,
I wondered if this would affect watch history
or viewing preferences, sub boxes,
but as far as I'm aware, there's been no reports
of any odd things happening to viewers
on YouTube since the outage.
For video creators, it doesn't look
as if anybody's content has been deleted,
titles changed, or anything untoward
in terms of their analytics.
But, of course, the one thing
that every single video creator lost
on YouTube was that hour of watch time,
and what does that mean to people's bottom line
when it comes to AdSense?
Now, this is gonna vary wildly from channel to channel,
but let's say you get two dollars per one thousand views,
and you average five thousand views per hour,
that means, potentially, your channel could
have lost ten dollars in that time.
Now, of course, this is all theoretical,
and everybody was in the same YouTube outage boat,
but it does highlight one thing,
and that's not to put all of your eggs
in one social media basket.
The bottom line is we are on rented ground.
YouTube doesn't owe you anything.
So, if there is a policy change,
a tweak to the algorithm, or a technical glitch,
all it takes is (snaps) one thing
and your business on YouTube could be over.
So if you are growing as a YouTube channel,
think about diversification.
Whether that be Facebook, Instagram,
the go-to place seemed to be Twitter when YouTube was down.
Yeah, it's always a good idea to have
your social media presence on more than just one platform.
On the other hand, where there's chaos, (claps)
there's opportunity.
Ahh,
phew!
YouTube is working again.
I'm sure we were all stressing out a little bit there,
for a brief moment.
But I'm here, I'm alive.
All of you here are chatting to me,
and you seem to be alive, which is awesome.
So, thank you very much,
and, to be honest,
we're trying to hit a trending topic here.
This is the second YouTube came back online,
we did a live stream to cover the story
using the keywords related to the event:
YouTube down, and YouTube is down.
We knew there would be a very small window
of opportunity to capitalize on this trending topic,
and because of our entrepreneurial YouTube instinct,
so to speak, we were at the top of the search terms
for a brief amount of time before all
the conspiracy theorists moved in.
And though our live stream got four times
as many viewers as we usually get,
we knew that not only our core audience would be interested,
but also the entirety of YouTube for
that brief moment in time.
Which leads us back to this video.
We're doubling down on our most successful content,
and you should do the same.
If you want to learn more about the double-down strategy,
we've got a video right here
which tells you everything you need to know,
and if you want to watch that live stream
in its entirety as YouTube went down,
we've got it down here.
Enjoy the rest of your video making day,
as long as YouTube keeps on workin'.