How’d you like to be the programmer that gets a call before 9 a.m. Pacific time, and someone’s yelling about how the YouTube homepage isn’t loading correctly? Your hangover swells as you hear the barking shrill of a panicked voice say something about the logo missing.
Would you kinda feel like the guy in a television station’s master control box that accidentally loads the wrong show tape? Or the one during the live pledge drive that activates the wrong mike so instead of the host we hear the lav mike from the bathroom? What? Not that I’d know.
How can the world’s largest video sharing site go down even briefly? What’s the lost advertising revenue associated with an hour of YouTube down time? It’s got to cost more than the hourly wage of some teenager in India. I’m guessing this techno error cost more than the free snacks in the Google complex today.
All they can hope is that visitors think the problem is on their end or their browser… and that nobody grabs a screen shot of the site — absent its logo — and blogs about it so it lives for eternity.
