It is a well-known fact that the moment YouTube goes down, the collective productivity of Earth increases by approximately 4,000%, which is immediately squandered by everyone going to Hacker News to read comments about YouTube being down. I myself have taken to podcasts… an ancient medium in which people simply talk at you for ninety minutes without a single sponsorship for a mobile game, and this is considered a failure
They've begun injecting obnoxious ads into the downloadable mp3s on a lot of podcasts I've found. Hyperlocal ads for tire shops and bakeries.
I don't want to buy tires, I want to learn about ______. The ads don't even make sense because they're irrelevant.
I listen to multi-hour unsponsored content on Youtube almost exclusively.
Well one must also argue the opposite. I myself have gained immense knowledge from YouTube. I have learned things like phone screen replacements or phone battery replacements. I call myself a mechanic from the school of YouTube and have saved myself at minimum $10k in repairs doing the work myself. I have learned to make endless food recipes or create things like giant bubbles or slime for my kids. My point is that I bet sure for some YouTube is a massive time sink waste of time. But I also wonder how much it has improved the knowledge, skills and ability of others. My dad often mentions how had he had YouTube when he was younger how much it would have done for him. He talks about having to go to the library and if lucky there was a book that could show you the knowledge you were looking for. He says but now you can find not just the knowledge but for example specific knowledge like car make model and year and how exactly to do job xyz. Ultimately I just can not imagine life without the wealth of knowledge YouTube has given me.
Congratulations! You’ve successfully avoided YouTube Shorts.
[delayed]
Personally, I just scroll through them. They break the feed into well defined "chapters" at the end of what I can decide to look into the next one or go somewhere else because there's nothing good there today.
Also there's this woman that makes very funny shorts about software development and good long videos that aren't as good. I look for her shorts too.
Lol I laughed out loud reading this comment. When shorts first came out they annoyed me to no end. I searched for how to block them through settings or other ways to just make them go away.
But now days I can admit there are a few, very few, content creators who create shorts that are very informative and straight to the point that can cover a topic and give you many facts and let you decide if you want to seek more. Sometimes it is nice to have the 30 seconds Coles notes verses a video stretched out to 10 minutes to be eligible for monetization.
BUT, and this is a big but, the shorts and similar video platform trends scare me as a parent. I can see how my kids find a 1.5 hour movie boring but can scroll endlessly through shorts. It might seem harmless letting your kid just scroll on YouTube from my perspective is like an addiction and kids are getting that dopamine hit watching a clip and seconds later watching something else. I've learned that it is very important to be aware of what your kids are being accustomed to and push them in the right direction.
Ah, so that’s probably why YouTube is also down (at the time of this comment)
I am playing a YouTube video (since the time of this comment) and it has not been interrupted.
I am too. But I just loaded up a new youtube page and it's completely white except for a few menu buttons.
It seems to be back, now.
You can still see your subscription videos, just not the homepage.
Searching also works. Actually it seems only the recommendation system is down, which I'd say isn't completely a bad thing.
It is pretty annoying for those of us for whom the recommendation system actually works well.
What do you recommend?
(i'm that old)
My subscriptions page just shows an error. And the app version won't load at all.
I'm able to play videos that are bookmarked in my browser, but the YouTube home page errors out.
Perhaps the same underlying cause, but there's no reason why Google's public CA being temporarily down would bring YouTube down.
It could prevent Google from rotating in new instances, because they aren't able to obtain a certificate.
Although, if that is the case, I would expect to to impact basically every google site.
If multiple services are affected, it's probably some underlying infrastructure issue.
Google uses mTLS for communications between systems and it could just be bad timing.
Yeah companies which also operate CAs can print as many certs as they want so it’s tempting to use a bunch everywhere with very short expiry.
The status history on the page makes it seem like this was intentional?
> 17 Feb 2026 11:32 PST A rollout is going to prevent issuance from occurring. We will provide an estimate on when issuance will stop.
> 17 Feb 2026 12:14 PST Issuance is beginning to stop. A fix to resolve the issue will roll out in about 8 hours
This usually indicates that the CA was issuing non-compliant certificates and needed to prevent further non-compliance. Will be interesting to watch Bugzilla for the incident report: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?product=CA%20Progra...
What qualifies as a non-compliant certificate?
It doesn't comply with one or more root store policies (which all incorporate the Baseline Requirements by reference, which incorporate various specs, such as RFC5280, by reference).
Mozilla root store policy: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/governance/policies/secu...
Chrome root store policy: https://googlechrome.github.io/chromerootprogram/
Apple root store policy: https://www.apple.com/certificateauthority/ca_program.html
Baseline Requirements: https://github.com/cabforum/servercert/blob/main/docs/BR.md
There are countless examples of non-compliant certificates documented in the Bugzilla component I linked above. A recent example: a certificate which was backdated by more than 48 hours, in violation of section 7.1.2.7 of the Baseline Requirements: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2016672
The heading above that:
"There is an ongoing incident that will force issuance to be halted."
Feels like they were alerted to some current problem severe enough that "turn it off now" was the right move. Breaking the baseline requirements somehow maybe?
> A fix to resolve the issue will roll out in about 8 hours
oof
I guess it's good Google hasn't succeeded in forcing people to renew certificates every 8 hours (yet)
That feeling when you have to suspend production service until the time lock safe can be opened.
I worked at RSADSI when I was a kid and supported the custom spin of TIPEM Hayden and Sophia used at Verisign. This brings back some very bad memories.
But... hopefully... people created overlapping windows of cert validity so there's always a valid cert available for their services and can tolerate the CA being out of action for 8(?) hours. Imagine if your TGS/Kerberos or AWS IAM IdP was down for 8 hours.
Thought my Revanced patch got outdated for a second. Phew.
Have you had to update microG yet?
Not sure but it is very strange i was served a strange tom And jerry video https://youtu.be/rilFfbm7j8k
You can watch any YT video by directly following a link or from history/playlist etc. Its just their homepage etc is down
It's a good thing we have ever-shrinking certificate lifetimes and automation never breaks. That's what I've been told, anyway.
Yeah, this could end up as the actual root cause of The Great Oops that I've been raving about for years. And Google probably would be the right company to fuck it up in the worst way possible since Google Knows Best In All Situations.
I don't subscribe to your newsletter. What about the Oops?
I can't wait for the Great Oops.
Please tell me more about The Great Oops
It's inevitable that one of the major cloud providers will irrecoverably delete all customer data with one single fat-fingered command. Though in google's case I'll also consider the prophecy to be fulfilled if they delete their own data.
It will forever be known as The Great Oops.
It's not inevitable, it's essentially impossible.
There are a few things that can cause tremendously widespread outages, essentially all of them network configuration changes. Actually deleting customer data is dramatically more difficult to the point of impossible - there are so many different services in so many different locations with so many layers of access control. There is no "one command" that can do such a thing - at the scale of a worldwide network of data centers there is no "rm -rf /".
Ah, but you fail to account for Google's incredible knack for building tools designed to do things at scale. Or put AI in things that don't need it.
The possibility Google will either manage to unleash a malicious AI on their infrastructure and/or develop a way to destroy a lot of data at scale quite efficiently or some combination of the two is far from zero.
I don’t know if you’re being serious but that’s laughable
That seems unlikely. Is Google run by one Homer Simpson?
Yes.
There's at least five free ACME CAs, with failover it doesn't matter all that much if one of them falls over. If all of them fall over at once there's probably a more pressing issue like nuclear holocaust or alien invasion going on.
How many servers are set up with CA redundancy? I've yet to see one let alone hear of this practice.
I couldn't say how many servers bother, but it's not difficult to set up if you're concerned about that possibility. Caddy lets you specify any number of ACME providers to try in sequence if the previous ones fail.
Frankly even with no CA redundancy, downtime would have to drag on for weeks to actually disrupt renewals. ACME certs usually get rotated after about 2/3rds of their duration has expired, so 45 day certs will still have about two weeks of wiggle room.
They aren't all drop in replacements for each other though. For example, Let's Encrypt offers free wildcard certs (with dns verification), but for ZeroSSL, it requires a paid subscription.
I was thinking about the time some software influencer said that if you are afraid to deploy on Friday then there's something wrong with you. Eff that! Murphy's Law! (allen holub - https://x.com/allenholub/status/1637111242610610182)
I often deployed on Friday evening. Several factors contributed to this decision.
1. Sales volume was lowest on weekends so if something went wrong it would affect fewer customers.
2. If something went wrong and I needed to revert, nobody was at work on weekends so it would not disrupt coworkers.
3. I always made it so reverting would be easy.
4. Most of my weekends were just relaxing at home, mostly doing online stuff (games, reading, videos) or doing offline stuff at my computer (programming my personal projects). It wasn't much of a bother at all to have an ssh open to something at work monitoring the new deployment for problems for the rest of Friday night and Saturday.
Eight hour estimated restoration time!
youtube (recommendations/homepage) also seems down, I wonder if its relater.
I can see all the videos and play the ones in my subscription tab though.
Oh no, whatever will we do without the inundation of e-thot shorts and AI-generated weight loss snake oil scam videos?
Never see these. Skill issue?
I'm inundated with them. YT has become borderline unusable. The homepage is nightmarish.
Can't search for anything without being overwhelmed with shorts in the results, many unrelated to what I'm searching.
I also never get these. It might be because you interact with them.
I browse logged out. Interact when them I do not. The weight loss and solar scams are forced advertisements before every video.
> I browse logged out. Interact when them I do not.
The logged out experience is closer to the interests of the average person. So if you're not pruning (and savings) your interests, that's hardly surprising.
The average person wants to be served AI slop and scams?
What the average person says they want and what they will actually chose behaviorally will often not line up.
> I browse logged out.
This is like the guy who goes to the doctor complaining of eye pain whenever he drinks tea. "Have you tried taking the teaspoon out?"
Welp, looks like they're back up. Home page and notifications are loading just fine now.
Time to go over my Watch Later list
Here's a direct link to the latest Veritasium. You're welcome!
Hmm why youtube does not work but google.com does.
Now I'm wondering if you rely on OCSP in a TLS client and the pki is Google does it still works?
Interesting. If you go to youtube.com it's all messed up; missing all the videos in the listings. But if you follow a video embedded in another site to youtube, it'll show and play fine. It'll break if you try to browse away from it.
Yeah, YouTube is not one server, it's hundreds of them. The videos are served mostly from CDNs (the Content Distribution Network). It's a different set of servers than handles account logins, routing, etc.
Some Google Services are also down at the moment, unrelated to YouTube, so probably a failure along some common infrastructure pipeline.
Your History, Subscriptions and search should all work. You should be able to see any creator's page if you go to it directly. The videos are all still watchable. It's primarily the home page and recommended videos that are having issues. Basically any place they recommend videos you haven't seen is broken right now, but the videos are still there and accessible.
I've tried via VPN from the U.S., U.K., Sweden, Germany, Russia, Colombia, etc. Same issue across the board.
Heroku having service issues, dependency related?
seeing heroku issues here too, had assumed it was salesforce's fault, bc of course they are eventually going to destroy heroku somehow, right?
Good thing I have nebula.tv for when youtube breaks
Isn't that the thing that a bunch of YouTube creators pitch inside their channels along with VPNs and supplements? I would never consider it because the ads rub me the wrong way. Or is it some alternative frontend for YouTube that happens to have a similar sounding name?
Not quite. It's a co-op, where the creators own the shares of the company.
Supposedly a more holistic approach to video hosting with less oversight from the platform itself.
It is a co-op where creators make videos without the threat of being demonetized or algorithmically punished - and it’s not garbage in the way you might expect people fearful of being demonetized might be.
Lots of excellent legal analysis, history, logistics, engineering content there.
It was initially founded by some of the most popular information YouTubers like CGPGrey, but he mysteriously left the project (I suspect one side wanted to be evil and the other side did not)
It's a place for creators to host long form content (that the google algorithm now disincentivizes) as well as history content that can't show a lot of history because of "violence" (like the holocaust).
Youtube is demonetizing channels left, right, and centre.
Nebula is actually quite a decent alternative/supplement to YouTube and worth the subscription IMHO.
While were all here does anyone want to launch a startup for a cloud security tool I built
Down here in Southeast Asia
Still down
Did someone buy the google.com domain again?
Everyone loves to say they work at $FAMOUS_COMPANY, but when something like this happens, no-one will say that they did this.
Looking forward to the post-mortem.
Oh I am more than happy to tell people how I took down entire Google Cloud 11 years ago. I mean, of course to the level of details Google is comfortable with to share externally :)
I mean, with any sufficiently large project or system it’s rarely super accurate to say one person did something.
All is down in eu too