Experts say YouTube outage not suspicious

The outage of Google-owned YouTube yesterday was caused by a technical issue rather than the rumoured outside interference from Chinese hackers, the web giant has confirmed.

"YouTube is up again following a technical issue which has now been resolved," YouTube said in a written statement.

"We know how important YouTube is for people, and apologise for any inconvenience the downtime may have caused."

The outage, which lasted for around an hour yesterday morning, was immediately seized on by some commentators as being evidence of Chinese reprisals after Google announced the closure of its .cn search site at the beginning of the week.

However, a new blog post from network security firm Arbor Networks seems to support YouTube's statement.

"While Google's YouTube outage today generated a steady stream of tweets and blog posts, a quick look at traffic across 50 or so small/mid-size ISPs around the world suggests this was more of a 'blip' than a global outage," wrote Arbor chief scientist Craig Labovitz.

"Certainly the outage was nowhere as large nor prolonged as the great 'GoogleLapse' last year."