Google's YouTube was down for as much as two hours this afternoon, according to tipsters' reports. Good thing it had major advertisers cooped up in a Manhattan nightclub, rather than at their desks, clicking "play" on clips to no avail. Likewise, unexpected outbursts of productivity swept the Valley until the site came back around 6 p.m. YouTube's last major outage was in August 2006, before Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion and showered it with bandwidth and servers. One wonders what YouTube's excuse is this time. And how much money Google avoided losing for every minute YouTube was offline.

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