[https://unsplash.com/photos/youtube-in-smartphone-UfseYCHvIH0]

And… breathe. A few weeks on from the outage across Canada, it’s still hard not to click on the YouTube app and peek through semi-closed fingers.

Even though it only lasted for a few hours, the impact felt far more significant, especially since YouTube has garnered a reputation as being a stable, reliable, and nearly always available entertainment and information platform.

It doesn’t help, either, that YouTube is one of the most popular platforms in the country! Sure, users might utilise streaming platforms for movies, TV shows and, more recently, live games, but YouTube has become the certified ‘everyday’ platform.

This is where users go to consume everything from tutorials and music videos to news and podcasts. Essentially, it’s a one-stop hub for all forms of entertainment, information, and discovery, so an outage like this quickly feels like a major disruption to daily life. With this in mind, it’s important for us to know the cause, and yet this isn’t actually something that’s been revealed.

Problem, Resolution, Silence

It’s important to note, of course, that the major YouTube outage wasn’t just felt in Canada. Indeed, this outage affected thousands globally, with reports from the US, the UK, Australia, and even blah. Bear in mind that YouTube has over 2 billion monthly users, and it becomes clear just how much of a major problem it was.

It’s not just users who are affected by something like this, after all. According to a recent study, there are over 63 million content creators operating on the platform, many of whom rely upon it as their source of income.

Because of the outage, a good portion of creators saw a pause in viewer engagement, which ultimately affected their ad performance and revenue, despite the prompt resolution. You would have thought, then, that YouTube would appease their concerns by explaining exactly what the problem was. But while the resolution was quick, the silence after it has been deafening.

Assigning the Cause

Since the widespread disruption, YouTube has not publicly disclosed the cause of the outage. The company only stated that teams were investigating the cause, and later confirmed that the issue was resolved.

As a result, many users and creators have been left feeling frustrated and seeking transparency. In an era where digital platforms have become so integral to people’s livelihoods, how could such a massive outage happen to the biggest video-sharing platforms in the world? How could it impact millions of users and creators seemingly overnight?

Thankfully, there are ways to answer these questions ourselves, and that’s by looking at what normally causes outages like this. For instance, an API dependency failure can easily disrupt the flow of data between services, preventing apps like YouTube from functioning properly.

A DNS or routing incident could also block users from reaching the platform, effectively making it inaccessible, and if it was an Edge or CDN configuration issue, then that could have caused content delivery delays or complete service interruptions for a large number of users – as is what happened in this case.

The most important thing is that, right now, there’s no public confirmation that this was a cybersecurity issue, like it was for the highly-publicised NS Power incident earlier in the year. Of course, outages from configuration or dependency failures can look similar to an attack, but in this case, the scale, timing, and resolution point to an internal technical issue rather than malicious activity.

Conclusion

Something else to remember is that an outage like this can be a good thing for companies. Now that it’s happened, it’s unlikely that the same system weakness will go unnoticed again – teams will investigate, implement the necessary safeguards, and make sure the platform is far more resilient in the future.

Does that mean we’ll never have another outage? Probably not. But you can be comfortable in the knowledge that YouTube’s engineers will be actively learning from this incident, reducing the likelihood and impact of future disruptions.