The YouTube streaming service had a downtime of one to two hours during Wednesday evening US time. Millions of people around the globe weren’t able to stream videos on the service because of the disruption. These many countries and more include The United States, Europe, South American, and the Asia Pacific.
A group of hacktivists known as “Ghost Squad Hackers” (GSH) claims to be responsible for the downtime caused on the Google-owned Youtube servers. GSH Tweeted that they were responsible for the disruption on Twitter Wednesday morning, self-boasting about it, but without giving valid proof of their claim.
So far Google has kept their mouth shut regarding the cause of the disruption. YouTube has since been restored and is up and running; YouTube tweeted that the issue has been resolved.
It is important to notify our readers that GSH has a history of cyber attacks, including the CNN servers in previous operations. They are also known to have defaced numerous Afghan websites during 2016. These defaces included the Bank of Israel and the website owned by the Israeli Prime Minister.
Their preferred tactics are to perform distributed denial of service attacks, or DDos. It has been suggested by security analysts that these same cyber warfare tactics could have been used by them to disrupt YouTube on Wednesday.
Some twitter users had reports of services such as YouTube, YouTube Music, and YouTube TV being down for nearly two hours on Wednesday. They say the homepage of YouTube was either displaying no videos, or showed a network error when accessed with the mobile. It also affected computer users.
However, it may have been ICANN according to ICANN.org. Here is the start of the ICANN statement:
LOS ANGELES – 15 October 2018 – The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has determined that the first-ever changing of the cryptographic key that helps protect the Domain Name System (DNS) has been completed with minimal disruption of the global Internet. It was the first time the key has been changed since it was first put in use in 2010.
Adding to the confusion, Ghost Squad Hackers were not the only ones taking credit. A separate group calling itself “Project Zorgo,” which had been positioning itself online as an anti-YouTube collective, also claimed it had knocked the platform offline that same night, even posting a screenshot of a blank YouTube page as supposed evidence. Neither claim was ever backed by technical proof, and to this day no party has produced verifiable evidence that they caused the outage. The competing boasts only underscore a recurring problem with hacktivist outage claims: taking credit costs nothing, while substantiating it is another matter entirely.
What is clear is that Google never publicly attributed the disruption to any hacking group. The most grounded reading, shared by independent security observers, is that the simultaneous failure of YouTube, YouTube Music, and YouTube TV pointed toward an internal fault or infrastructure issue on Google’s side rather than an external DDoS campaign. When a single company’s tightly linked services all go dark at once, a back-end misconfiguration is usually a more plausible explanation than a flood of outside traffic.
The episode also fits a much broader pattern. Over the years, major online platforms including The New York Times, Spotify, Netflix, CNN, and Fox News have all been knocked offline at various points by DDoS exploits or internal failures, and the public is frequently left guessing at the true cause while opportunistic groups rush to claim credit. For readers, the takeaway is to treat any unverified “we did it” announcement with healthy skepticism until hard evidence appears.
For more background on how distributed denial of service campaigns and hacktivist claims unfold, see our ongoing coverage in Anonymous News.
