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YouTube Canned

YouTube Canned

I would have been pulling my non-existant hair out today if I was the sysadmin over at YouTube. After a 6 hour unplanned outage due to “database issues”.

As a sysadmin for a major media company that has experienced outages before, I begin sweating profusely the moment I get my first alert of an outage. Forty-five minutes is too long for me, despite how small of a downtime percentage that represents. I can’t imagine running the servers at YouTube and the stress that places on an individual.

Interesting question though. If you are responsible for the uptime of a high-demand service, do you admit failure and hope that fate smiles fondly, or do you just keep plugging away when service is restored? If it’s a self-inflicted wound, do you admit that or if it is a third party, do you blame them?

View Comments (2)
  • As a person responsible for supporting network services I sold customers for many years, I can tell you it’s very rare that I’d admit defeat.

    Get everything back up and running as fast as possible, and do your best to move on.

  • Inline with this post. YouTube now has taken the embeds in blogs away again. I know this was an issue with myspace. No after seeing they have done upgrades that all video embeds are not working and this with youtube back up and running. So whats YOUTUBE up to? Anyone?

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