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YouTube channel pages down for several hours Monday

You could still watch videos, but couldn't get to them by clicking on channel links.

Richard Nieva Former senior reporter
Richard Nieva was a senior reporter for CNET News, focusing on Google and Yahoo. He previously worked for PandoDaily and Fortune Magazine, and his writing has appeared in The New York Times, on CNNMoney.com and on CJR.org.
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YouTube channel pages were down for several hours Monday afternoon.

 CNET

If you were getting an error message while searching for YouTube videos through channel pages on Monday, you weren't alone.

The world's largest online video site, which is owned by Google, confirmed that channel pages went down for about three hours. To be clear, you could still watch videos on the site -- you just couldn't find them by clicking on channel pages.

A YouTube spokeswoman said the pages went down starting around noon PT. They started to reappear around 3 p.m. PT.

Technical difficulties on websites aren't uncommon. But for a site as large was YouTube, with more than a billion visitors a month, the snafu could have created headaches for its web of viewers, creators and advertisers. 

"Some people encountered errors when accessing channel pages on YouTube today," a YouTube spokeswoman said in a statement. "We worked quickly to address the issue and fixed the problem. We're sorry for any inconvenience this caused."

First published April 2 at 2:38 p.m. PT.
Update, 4:51 p.m. PT: Story reworked to reflect the outage ending. 

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