OOPS!! Youtube Down For Maintenance? For How Long?

If you visited Youtube on July 9th 2009, then you're in for a surprise! One of the Internet's leading web sites, youtube is shut down by Google(TM) for maintenance. This is shocking news by any standard to the hundreds of millions of visitors that go to www.youtube.com daily to watch videos.

So, how does this effect the millions of web sites that embed youtube videos? After checking the videos on this site, it appears the videos will continue to work during the outage of the world's leading video sharing web site, youtube.com.

How will the outage of Youtube.com effect the Internet traffic?
Youtube is ranked 3rd on Alexa which means there are two web sites on the Internet that get more traffic that Youtube. So, where will all those visitors go on the Internet since Youtube is down for maintenance? The answer is, those same visitors will search for news on Youtube being down.

So, here is the scoop. Youtube announced the past few days via a message on youtube.com web site telling its visitors that the web site will be down for maintenance for a few hours. So, those who noticed will know what happened, those who didn't will see the message on the web site right now that tells them they need to come back later because there will be no video watching happening at this time.

UPDATE: It appears Youtube is no longer down for maintenance. This is probably good news for everyone that watchs videos online!