YouTube Down For Maintenance. Right.

“YouTube is down for maintenance and will be back shortly,” says the site. The site first went down at around 9:30 California time. Or possibly earlier, we’re sorting through the Twitter barrage – “is down” is a trending topic right now.

Most companies plan maintenance for short periods in the middle of the night, so our guess is this is maintenance of the unplanned sort. 2+ hours and counting isn’t a trivial amount of downtime. We’ve asked Google for a statement on when it might be back up, and what caused the outage.

Update: Erictric says this may be part of a YouTube store rollout. I’m dubious.

Update 2: A YouTube spokesperson says: “We are aware that some users are having difficulty accessing videos on YouTube. We are working hard to fix the issue and will have the site back to normal as soon as possible.”