Servers at YouTube failed Thursday afternoon, making the website and its videos across the web temporarily unavailable. The downtime sent people into a panic between 4 p.m. ET and 4:30 p.m. ET.
The site is now back up, but "YouTube Goes Down" is still a worldwide trending topic on Twitter.
"A team of highly trained monkeys has been dispatched to deal with this situation," said the error message.
The "500 Internal Server Error" came after a filing error leaked Google's earnings four hours too early.
"Some users encountered errors, or a slower than normal experience on YouTube (Thursday) for a few minutes," a YouTube spokesperson told Mashable. "Our engineers worked quickly to address the issue and fixed the problem. We're sorry for any inconvenience this caused our users."
YouTube is down. Does this mean worker productivity is up?— Digg (@digg) October 18, 2012
YouTube is down. This is it, my friends. The end of the world.— Claw'b GraveRobber (@RobDenBleyker) October 18, 2012
youtube is down. i think its a good reason to jump in a ditch. #whyyoutubewhy— Madison Beer (@MadisonElleBeer) October 18, 2012
YOUTUBE IS DOWN?!?! THIS IS WHY ONLINE MEDIA WILL NEVER TAKE OVER TELE...*your skybox is not responding*— Stephen Byrne (@3sixty5days) October 18, 2012
BONUS: Entertaining 404 Error Pages
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