Yes, YouTube Momentarily Went Down With an 'Internal Server Error', Twittersphere Erupts

Websites go down for a variety of reasons and it's rare that there is widespread notice. But when it's YouTube and at the time of day when workers are headed on the video-sharing site for their afternoon fix, the Internet as a more collective body becomes concerned.

When visiting www.YouTube.com Thursday afternoon around the four o'clock hour (EST), a message stating 500 Internal Service Error was posted on the site.

Screenshot of the error message while YouTube was down. 

"Sorry, something went wrong. A team of highly trained monkeys has been dispatched to deal with this situation," the message continued.

Naturally, when a large website goes down, the next place users go is to Twitter to see if everyone else is experiencing the issue as well. Here are a few of the tweets.

A 500 Internal Service Error is described as a "catch-all error generated by the Web server" that pops up when "something has gone wrong, but the server can not be more specific about the error condition in its response to the client."

TheBlaze tried embedded YouTube videos on other sites as well -- just in case -- and found they were not functioning at the time either.

Luckily, within a few minutes the site was back up and running. The Internet wiped its brow in a collective sigh of relief.

This downing of YouTube came just a day after Google opened its doors in a virtual tour of its data centers that house servers to keep its platforms, like YouTube, running. We can be sure the "highly trained monkeys" were scrambling at one of these centers to get the site back up within a timely fashion.

Update: A faction of Anonymous claimed credit for attacking YouTube and the website GitHub with distributed denial of service attacks. These claims were not yet verified by sources from the downed sites.

This is a developing story. We'll update it as more information becomes available.