Tech Trend 247

YouTube suffered a major outage this morning that appeared to affect most of its users worldwide. Although the site was back up again within the hour, it marks the first major outage for the Google-owned service in years.

The outage began at about 7:30 a.m. Eastern Time. As soon as it happened, frustrated users noted the outage on Twitter.

YouTube service appeared to be restored for most users as of about 8:15 a.m. ET.

While many Internet services have suffered outages over the last few years, including Twitter, Pinterest, Google Drive and even 1.6-billion-strong Facebook, YouTube has been more or less immune from global, crippling outages — at least until this morning. The last major outage for the service was in November 2013, although it experienced a minor disruption in March 2014.

While it may be surprising a service that's responsible for roughly 18% of Internet traffic would be so stable, it's no doubt in part due to its constant straightforwardness: While its contemporaries have added more and more features and real-time interactions for its users, YouTube's basic product remains the same — a destination for uploading and viewing video.

Representatives for Google didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

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