On the night of October 16, 2018, there was the Internet service outage heard ‘round the world. For a couple of hours, people hadn’t been able to access the famous video-sharing website YouTube. No matter where you went to access the site, nothing was working. All viewers could see on the web is either an error 505 message or the site with no recommended videos. And even if you can click on a video, it just wouldn’t play.  

Some famous YouTubers immediately took to Twitter to voice their jokes. Rebecca Parham’s and theoddonesout’s tweets were especially hilarious. The former jokingly requesting Disney to look at how well she draws since she might need to seek employment elsewhere, and the latter proclaiming the people are finally free from the site’s evil clutches.  

In all seriousness, it does raise some legit concerns. YouTube animator CypherDen tweeted, “If YouTube is down then where do I upload this video? :o.” To which I reply: that’s a good question.

YouTube has been quite a juggernaut in this sort of industry. Hank Green tweeted, “It occurs to me that YouTube is, like, a very very big part of my life.” Funny thing is, I started thinking that a long while before Mr. Green ever put pen to Twitter feed. If I listen to music or wanted to watch something from either some clips from my favorite tv shows or an episode from one of my favorite YouTubers, I automatically check the app on my phone. It’s rare that I would go anywhere else.

YouTube’s presence is so wide and vast, it practically overshadows other sites. Since I can’t think of any other site besides DailyMotion that shares videos online, I guess you could call what YouTube is doing a near-monopoly. And some people make a living out of making videos for that site. So, when that platform appears to be down, it not only makes viewing and putting videos on the site impossible, but it also begs the question: what should we, the consumers, do?

Well, an obvious answer is to not call the police. As with any blackout, all systems go through this eventually. It’ll pass, and when it does, it will be like nothing ever happened. On top of that, there’s a good chance the police can’t really fix the issue. The cops are here to protect and serve the community from real threats, not deal with petty problems on your computer. They are police, not IT employees. Believe it or not, there’s a difference.          

Another way to pass the time is read a book. Go outside. Do your homework. Or do literally anything else. It helps take your mind off of what’s bothering you. And since the rest of the Internet appears to be working, you can look up DIY blogs, so you can try something new and discover something you might not have done before.

And of course, if you have other music-streaming services for listening to music on your laptop or phone, such as ITunes and Spotify, then use them. They exist on your laptop for a reason, and hey, they’re still working. You can listen to pretty much whatever you want. You can thank your lucky stars they still exist and are functional.  

And those are solutions I can list off in the event of another outage that lasts about a few hours. But what about if the site is down for good?

Of course, there’s Twitter. Quite a lot of YouTubers post there quite frequently. And, like I mentioned earlier, reading their jokes are quite hilarious. But in terms of seeing content, unless you have enough money to support your favorite creators on Patreon or any crowdfunding site of the like, you might not be seeing a new video from Pewdiepie for quite a while.

Even so, the Internet does have a unique way of making things big. Perhaps like a phoenix, a new site would rise out of the ashes that would continue the work YouTube started, while also maybe making things a little better. Then again, one could only hope.