YouTube every once in awhile is in a maintenance mode, and Monday night December 06, 2010 was one of those nights. During read-only mode, videos could be uploaded, but did not go live (as users were alerted to the fact on the upload page). The Cardinal also noticed that previously uploaded titles could not be edited and saved.
After clicking the UPLOAD button, an upload page appeared with the following message:
We are currently in read-only mode. Your upload will continue but will not go live or be editable until read-only mode is over.
When signed in, and viewing the Channel page or front page for the channel, a yellow bar appeared at the top with an exclamation [!] alert and a message that stated:
We are currently performing site maintenance. Be cool – we’ll be back 100% in a bit.
All viewing playback appeared to be functioning normally. The alert was first noticed about 815 p.m. CST December 06, 2010 and continuing approximately through 11:45 p.m. A video that was uploaded during YouTube read-only mode, automatically showed up as processing when read-only mode ended.
UPDATE: Other occurrences …
Tuesday October 4, 2011 10:30 pm. CT. Also YouTube rental purchases (youtube.com/movies) were also reported to be unavailable on October 4, 2011: “YouTube rental purchases are disabled while we are performing site maintenance. Please come back when maintenance is complete.”
Tuesday December 6, 2011 10:30 a.m. CT.
Monday August 26, 2013 starting about 8:30 p.m. CDT