244 pointsby aloknnikhil8 hours ago26 comments
  • TMEHpodcast7 hours ago
    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
    • PostOnce7 hours ago
      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.

      • 0_____05 hours ago
        VPN to Sweden to get the IP geolocated ads to retarget. The ads still exist but they're less obnoxious, and they're often in Swedish so you don't have to know what they're on about anyway.
      • ideasarecool2 hours ago
        At least it is somewhat relevant. Hearing ads about Irish telecom operator ads at the other side of europe is pretty goofy. What's the actual point? Just worsening the podcast experience?
      • moregrist6 hours ago
        Welcome to radio 2.0.

        Give it another 10-20 years and your 2 hour podcasts will be 30 minutes of morning zoo DJ banter, 10 minutes of guests, and 1.5 hours of ads.

        We’ll have reached peak 90s all over again. With any luck we’ll avoid recreating the conditions for another Nickelback and can stay in the weird zone where Trip Hop and pop punk could chart at the same time.

        • 1313ed012 hours ago
          The 00's podcasts I listened to were often in 2-3 hour episodes, rarely well scripted (or scripted at all?), but a lot of fun and very amateurish. I re-listened to several entire series recently and the episode lengths were the only thing I think was worse than in newer podcasts.

          On the other hand, if ads etc gets too annoying, I already have run all my downloaded podcasts through whisper to get transcripts with timestamps. Running some LLM to find ranges to delete would probably be quite easy. As a bonus I would be happy to also cut out all the filler repetitions that seem popular these days ("yes, X, I absolutely agree, [repeats everything X just said]"). Could probably cut 1 hour episodes to 20 minutes without losing any content.

        • blackoil4 hours ago
          > 2 hour podcasts

          You have high hopes. Next YT tool will be to split anything long in 30s reels as brains will be completely incapable of focusing for longer.

        • SchemaLoad5 hours ago
          And it will all be AI generated specifically for you live.
    • staticassertion7 hours ago
      I listen to multi-hour unsponsored content on Youtube almost exclusively.
    • 147 hours ago
      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.
      • TMEHpodcast7 hours ago
        Congratulations! You’ve successfully avoided YouTube Shorts.
        • com2kid6 hours ago
          YT shorts are up to 3 minutes now.

          At this point it is just YT Vertical Videos.

        • marcosdumay6 hours ago
          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.

          • jader2016 hours ago
            I just stay on my subscriptions page. Most of them don’t do Shorts, and the few that do don’t do many so they’re easy to ignore.
        • 147 hours ago
          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.

    • bdavbdav2 hours ago
      This comment sponsored by Vivo barefoot. I really do wear them myself. Honest.
    • 2Gkashmiri2 hours ago
      I watched a movie, same late night talk show host, something like "welcome night owls".

      I "loved" the style but I haven't found any actual radio on the internet of that style or a podcast. Not sure about name of movie but I do remember it being in the last 10-15 years.

  • kyledrake5 hours ago
    People went ballistic on me a few months ago for bringing this up, but this is exactly the kind of outage that makes me really, really worried about extremely short lived certificates. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46118371
    • codys3 hours ago
      I'm not sure I follow. This outage seems like it occurred for less than 1 day. The post you link to is about having certificates expire after 45 days. What's the connection you see?
      • jeroenhdan hour ago
        Some CAs are experimenting with shorter, 7 day certificates as well.

        still not an outage that would endanger anyone's ability to renew in time, but for small or extremely shitty CAs (and there are a lot of those) such an outage may take enough time to cause issues in theory I guess?

      • TwoNineFive3 hours ago
        You didn't read it or understand it.
    • aaomidi2 hours ago
      You know there’s more than one CA?
    • TwoNineFive3 hours ago
      Your license to website has been revoked.
  • kidfiji8 hours ago
    Ah, so that’s probably why YouTube is also down (at the time of this comment)
    • gzread8 hours ago
      I am playing a YouTube video (since the time of this comment) and it has not been interrupted.
      • brikym7 hours ago
        I am too. But I just loaded up a new youtube page and it's completely white except for a few menu buttons.
      • dyauspitr7 hours ago
        You can still see your subscription videos, just not the homepage.
        • cvhc7 hours ago
          Searching also works. Actually it seems only the recommendation system is down, which I'd say isn't completely a bad thing.
          • tzs7 hours ago
            It is pretty annoying for those of us for whom the recommendation system actually works well.
          • 65107 hours ago
            What do you recommend?

            (i'm that old)

        • LeoPanthera7 hours ago
          My subscriptions page just shows an error. And the app version won't load at all.
        • GeekyBear7 hours ago
          I'm able to play videos that are bookmarked in my browser, but the YouTube home page errors out.
      • cookiengineer5 hours ago
        > I am playing a YouTube video (since the time of this comment) and it has not been interrupted.

        So you're using snakeoil certificates and MITM proxies at work?

    • ekr____8 hours ago
      Perhaps the same underlying cause, but there's no reason why Google's public CA being temporarily down would bring YouTube down.
      • silverquiet8 hours ago
        If multiple services are affected, it's probably some underlying infrastructure issue.
      • qmarchi8 hours ago
        Google uses mTLS for communications between systems and it could just be bad timing.
        • LPisGood7 hours ago
          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.
      • thayne6 hours ago
        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.

  • bathtub3657 hours ago
    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

  • jtokoph7 hours ago
    > A fix to resolve the issue will roll out in about 8 hours

    oof

    • catsquirrel287 hours ago
      I guess it's good Google hasn't succeeded in forcing people to renew certificates every 8 hours (yet)
    • bawolff6 hours ago
      In theory 8 hours of downtime should be fine for a CA. Obviously not ideal, but the pki system is not meant to be a live system.
      • SchemaLoad5 hours ago
        Fairly sure it used to be pretty much a manual process where someone had to actually process your request for a certificate on the other side.
        • Ayesh13 minutes ago
          Yes, and it's not that long ago, or I aged really quickly.

          For code signing certificates and EV certificates, (and OV certificates, if they are even alive), this is still the case.

    • altairprime7 hours ago
      That feeling when you have to suspend production service until the time lock safe can be opened.
      • altairprime4 hours ago
        That feeling when you finally get the timelock safe open and have to do certificate work that shatters YouTube’s connection to the account personalization systems.
    • themafia4 hours ago
      The same amount of time it feels like it takes for my google functions to deploy.
  • tokyobreakfast7 hours ago
    It's a good thing we have ever-shrinking certificate lifetimes and automation never breaks. That's what I've been told, anyway.
    • bigbuppo7 hours ago
      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.
      • tokyobreakfast7 hours ago
        I don't subscribe to your newsletter. What about the Oops?
      • stickynotememo3 hours ago
        Do you have a blog post on the oops? I'd love to read it.
      • ocdtrekkie7 hours ago
        I can't wait for the Great Oops.
      • LPisGood7 hours ago
        Please tell me more about The Great Oops
        • bigbuppo7 hours ago
          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.

          • Arainach7 hours ago
            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 /".

            • rossjudson5 hours ago
              Delete a decryption key. Good luck! I'll see you at the end of time.

              Break your control plane, and you can't stop the propagation of poison.

              Propagate the wrong trust bundle... everywhere.

              Also, it's not about the delete command. It's about the automatic cleanup following behind it that shreds everything, or repurposes the storage.

              • bigbuppo4 hours ago
                Children of the kubernetic line.
            • GeekyBear4 hours ago
              Google accidentally deleted customer location history data from customer devices (after intentionally deleting it from Google servers) just last year.

              If didn't back it up yourself, it is gone forever.

            • ocdtrekkie6 hours ago
              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.

              Bear in mind, this "Little Oops" should also have been impossible: https://www.techspot.com/news/103207-google-reveals-how-blan...

              • Arainach6 hours ago
                .....no?

                "We deployed this private cloud with a missing parameter and it wasn't caught" is as different from "we wiped out all customer data" as hello world is from Kubernetes.

                No one promised this "should be impossible". Did you confuse "we'll take steps to ensure this never happens again"?

                • ocdtrekkie6 hours ago
                  It's pretty much half the puzzle actually.

                  You contend there's no global rm rf for a global cloud provider, but clearly a missing parameter can rm rf a customer in an irrecoverable manner.

                  The only half you're missing is... how every major cloud outage happens today... a bad configuration update. These companies have hundreds of thousands of servers, but they also use orchestration tools to distribute sets of changes to all of them.

                  You only need a command to rm rf one box, if you are distributing that command to every box.

                  Now sure, there are tons of security precautions and checks and such to prevent this! But pretending it's impossible is delusional. People do stupid stuff, at scale, every day.

                  The most likely scenario is a zero day in an environment necessitating an extremely rapid global rollout, combined with a plain, simple error.

                  • bigbuppo3 hours ago
                    And the most telling thing about most of these outages is that the provider later admits in their postmortem that they just didn't really understand how the system they made worked until it fell over and were forced to learn how it really works.

                    It's the sort of thing that used to keep me up at night.

                    • stephenran hour ago
                      When was the last time it wasn't a cascading failure caused by Rube Goldberg levels of interdependency on their own systems.
                  • Arainach5 hours ago
                    The release process, monitoring checks, etc. for a customer's private cloud is generally significantly different from the release process for a global product. I'm not going to get any more specific for all the standard NDA reasons, but having worked for Google and Microsoft among others....no, the risk you describe doesn't translate from one to the other.
                    • bigbuppo4 hours ago
                      Do you not remember crowdstrike?
                      • Arainach3 hours ago
                        Again: an outage caused by a config change is different from data loss.

                        The remediation was painful but it was not data loss.

                    • ocdtrekkie5 hours ago
                      I understand you believe the checks cannot fail that catastrophically, and I agree that the likelihood they do is quite low.

                      But it can happen, and it only has to happen once. (Also FYI, telling me your work history just tells me you've drunk the koolaid, ain't proof you know more.)

          • tokyobreakfast7 hours ago
            That seems unlikely. Is Google run by one Homer Simpson?
          • JyB6 hours ago
            I don’t know if you’re being serious but that’s laughable
            • SchemaLoad5 hours ago
              The idea that all customer data will be deleted is far fetched, but I feel like there have been some massive incidents. Crowdstrike comes to mind, but I feel its entirely possible that Apple/Google/etc could push out some kind of config update which bricks phones in a way they are unable to download another update to fix them.

              Though I'm sure the major players are all over this risk which is why it hasn't happened.

              • aragilar2 hours ago
                Google wiped all of UniSuper not too long ago by mistake, I don't see why such a occurrence couldn't happen more widely.
    • jsheard7 hours ago
      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.
      • tokyobreakfast7 hours ago
        How many servers are set up with CA redundancy? I've yet to see one let alone hear of this practice.
        • jsheard7 hours ago
          For one, Cloudflare uses four different CAs almost interchangeably. Caddy also makes it easy to configure ACME failover if you're self-hosting, and defaults to using two different CAs if you don't specify any.

          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 the upcoming 45 day certs will still have about 15 days of wiggle room.

          • thayne6 hours ago
            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.
            • jsheard6 hours ago
              ZeroSSL is weird, if you use their classic non-ACME interface then the free tier is indeed limited to 3 active certs which can't be wildcards, but if you use ACME then there's no limits and wildcards are allowed.

              https://zerossl.com/documentation/acme/

              > By using ZeroSSL's ACME feature, you will be able to generate an unlimited amount of 90-day SSL certificates at no charge, also supporting multi-domain certificates and wildcards.

          • antonvs5 hours ago
            So the question is why this hit Youtube and Youtube TV so hard. Presumably they’re relying on ephemeral instances being able to get certs immediately, or something like that.

            (Or an unrelated failure, of course)

    • msie7 hours ago
      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)
      • tzs7 hours ago
        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.

        • 4 hours ago
          undefined
  • rconti2 hours ago
    > The fix has been rolled out and the issuance flow has been undrained. We again apologize for the inconvenience.

    issuance flow has been undrained?

    • aaomidi2 hours ago
      Draining is terminology they use for draining traffic from a service.
  • h4ch18 hours ago
    Thought my Revanced patch got outdated for a second. Phew.
    • ddtaylor7 hours ago
      Have you had to update microG yet?
  • OhMeadhbh7 hours ago
    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.

    • antonvs5 hours ago
      For persistent services using the affected ACME API, the window is usually 30 days.

      But that didn’t stop Youtube and Youtube TV from going down hard. I imagine they’re provisioning ephemeral VMs or service instances and relying on them being able to get certs immediately, or something like that.

  • dijit8 hours ago
    youtube (recommendations/homepage) also seems down, I wonder if its relater.
    • dyauspitr7 hours ago
      I can see all the videos and play the ones in my subscription tab though.
    • tokyobreakfast7 hours ago
      Oh no, whatever will we do without the inundation of e-thot shorts and AI-generated weight loss snake oil scam videos?
      • bethekidyouwant7 hours ago
        Never see these. Skill issue?
        • tokyobreakfast7 hours ago
          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.

          • bawolff6 hours ago
            YT pushing videos can be annoying, but at the same time there is an element of human free will here. You can chose not to watch them.
          • LPisGood7 hours ago
            I also never get these. It might be because you interact with them.
            • tokyobreakfast7 hours ago
              I browse logged out. Interact when them I do not. The weight loss and solar scams are forced advertisements before every video.
              • tfsh7 hours ago
                > 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.

                • tokyobreakfast7 hours ago
                  The average person wants to be served AI slop and scams?
                  • LPisGood7 hours ago
                    What the average person says they want and what they will actually chose behaviorally will often not line up.
              • antonvs7 hours ago
                > 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?"

          • pvab35 hours ago
            Just block them. I haven't seen a short in months.
  • sciencesama7 hours ago
    Not sure but it is very strange i was served a strange tom And jerry video https://youtu.be/rilFfbm7j8k
    • nitinreddy887 hours ago
      You can watch any YT video by directly following a link or from history/playlist etc. Its just their homepage etc is down
  • PLenz7 hours ago
    Eight hour estimated restoration time!
  • edwaldojunior7 hours ago
    Time to go over my Watch Later list
  • Thaxll8 hours ago
    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?

    • arcfour6 hours ago
      OCSP is deprecated and basically dead at this point. Some clients still use it but I don't think many (any?) have actually enforced OCSP for years since it was notoriously fickle anyways.
    • kbelder8 hours ago
      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.
      • arkryal27 hours ago
        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.

  • 7 hours ago
    undefined
  • aaronmiler8 hours ago
    Heroku having service issues, dependency related?
    • flaxxer7 hours ago
      seeing heroku issues here too, had assumed it was salesforce's fault, bc of course they are eventually going to destroy heroku somehow, right?
  • spyrja7 hours ago
    Welp, looks like they're back up. Home page and notifications are loading just fine now.
  • RobRivera6 hours ago
    Is that what was happening with my youtube mid workout?
    • arduanika5 hours ago
      Correct. It's not youtube, it's themtube.
  • Kapura8 hours ago
    Good thing I have nebula.tv for when youtube breaks
    • benatkin8 hours ago
      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?
      • LPisGood7 hours ago
        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)

      • qmarchi7 hours ago
        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.

      • hylaride7 hours ago
        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.

      • kittoes7 hours ago
        Nebula is actually quite a decent alternative/supplement to YouTube and worth the subscription IMHO.
  • 1970-01-018 hours ago
    Did someone buy the google.com domain again?
    • Shellban3 hours ago
      I have the domain. If you want you cat videos back, you are going to have to pay me:

      ONE MILLION DOLLARS!

  • lawgimenez8 hours ago
    Down here in Southeast Asia
  • chiengineer7 hours ago
    While were all here does anyone want to launch a startup for a cloud security tool I built
  • manupati7 hours ago
    Still down
  • rvz8 hours ago
    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.

    • wbsun7 hours ago
      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 :)
      • exikyut18 minutes ago
        I'll bite; ok, what'd you do? :)
    • LPisGood7 hours ago
      I mean, with any sufficiently large project or system it’s rarely super accurate to say one person did something.
  • microm8 hours ago
    All is down in eu too