Youtube users were left in the lurch overnight as the service crashed for around two hours.
The widespread outage affected YouTube, YouTube TV and YouTube Music, and the Google-owned firm said it was looking into the issue after complaints poured in from around 1:30am.
Users trying to access the homepage were faced with a message which read: “Sorry, something went wrong. A team of highly trained monkeys has been dispatched to deal with this situation.”
It is not yet known what caused the issue.
The video sharing website reassured users that the issue was fixed in a statement issued around an hour after they acknowledged the site was down and apologised.
A statement on Twitter read: “Thanks for your reports about YouTube, YouTube TV and YouTube music access issues. We’re working on resolving this and will let you know once fixed.
“We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause and will keep you updated.”
One police force in the US advised people against dialling the emergency number to report the outage.
Philadelphia Police tweeted: “Yes, our @YouTube is down, too. No, please don’t call 911 - we can’t fix it.”
Meanwhile American gaming YouTuber Markiplier wrote: “YouTube’s down… Can it really be true? Am I finally… free?”
Tech YouTuber Marques Brownlee noted: “Never seen YouTube down for 30+ minutes like this before.”
The popular video-sharing site boasts at least 1 billion unique users every month.