DNS - YouTube, Wiki & Twitter Face Outages

When one of my favorite Web sites is MIA, out of commission or simply not loading properly, I tend to have a mild conniption.

So, when Yahoo! News reported that a bunch of heavily trafficked Web sites went down late Wednesday night and Thursday, I was sure there were cries heard round the world. Of those sites, Twitter went down last week, but alas, has recovered. Wikipedia and YouTube (News - Alert) both had their lights shut off yesterday, March 25.

Quick to recover, YouTube was already back and running just about an hour, but for those daunting 60 minutes, a “HTTP/1.1 Service Unavailable,” popped up on everyone’s Web browser.

In a recent TMCnet interview, a Youtube spokesperson said that the video broadcast Web site provider is up again following a technical issue yesterday which has now been resolved.

“We know how important YouTube is for people and apologize for any inconvenience the downtime may have caused,” the spokesperson told TMCnet. 

While the outage on YouTube is not the first & a bit misunderstood, there was a clear explanation to Wiki’s downtime late Wednesday.

According to the company’s Facebook (News - Alert) page, due to an overheating problem in its European data center, many of our servers turned off to protect themselves. As this impacted all Wikipedia and other projects access from European users, the company was forced to move all user traffic to our Florida cluster, for which it has a standard quick failover procedure in place that changes DNS entries. Wiki’s problem took about an hour to fix as well.

When Twitter went down last week, users were faced with just 30 minutes of unavailable access.