Biggest online video service goes offline

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Video watchers were twiddling their fingers Tuesday morning, wondering what to do, after heading over to YouTube and realizing the site was unavailable.

When visiting YouTube.com on January 19, surfers came to a page that displayed either an "Http/1.1 Service Unavailable" error or a "500 Internal Server error", causing many to speculate whether the Google-owned service had fallen victim to a cyber attack.

Twitter users were quick to complain about the site's downtime saying, "#youtube seems to be kaput this morning, probably undergoing maintenance of some description," "typing youtube.com in your Browser runs in Error 500", "Noooo... how will we cope without dancing cats and laughing babies?", "please fix youtube i keep getting errors" and "youtube is down! hmmm..cyber attack??"

Other users revealed, "isn't down, only the entry page is inaccessible. If you try a direct link on a video, it works."

By 11:30 AM GMT some users started reporting the site was back up and running, albeit slightly slower than normal.

Internet technology blog Mashable reported that YouTube was down for approximately 20 minutes.

Google had not responded to queries at the time of publishing.