Folks, I don’t know how something like this could happen, but I’m telling you - YouTube was completely off-line this morning around 9:30am here in Texas. and when I say off-line, I mean entirely.

I noticed it when someone at the office complained that a video wasn’t loading in the blog. Then we tried to go to their homepage, and… nothing. Nothing but an HTTP error at least. We tried on multiple computers too, but it doesn’t really matter because this is the type of error that only the Web servers spit out.

I’m guessing that most people would have missed this outage, but I wonder if anyone else did indeed notice it? It just goes to prove that even the big boys can go down sometimes. Still, it makes me wonder what switch could have been thrown to take down the entire site and all of the videos at once.

Religion is one of those topics I normally don’t want to touch with a 10 foot pole. I’ve found that no one ever agrees when it comes to this topic. Heck, I’ve seen Christians arguing with one another over the meaning of a particular passage of scripture, so you know no good can come of a debate with an Atheist.

Having said that, I was very disturbed to learn that some YouTube staffer decided to ban a member on religious grounds. Nick Gisburne, an outspoken member of the YouTube community recently posted a video comprised solely of a slide show of quotes taken from the Qur’an. All of the quotes deal with the negative aspects of being a non-believer - such as going to hell, being killed and burning for eternity.

Clearly this video illustrates just one side of the discussion, and I would imagine an appropriate Islamic response would have been a video depicting passages of love and peace from the same book. But no one had the chance to issue such a response.
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