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What happens when there’s no YouTube? Welcome to China

Homegrown online video services from Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent are flourishing in the world’s largest internet market

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How are Chinese netizens reacting? These faces say it all. (Picture: iQiyi/Huanyu Film/Weibo)
This article originally appeared on ABACUS

YouTube suffered a major global outage for at least an hour today, and the internet freaked out.

Social media was swamped with posts of panic-stricken users who wondered what to do with their lives. And while YouTube is banned in China, netizens still jumped at the chance to poke fun at the service interruption.

“Everything’s normal here. It’s still 404,” said one of the most popular comments on Chinese microblog Weibo.

“Thank god, the country has protected us well,” said another comment, which has since been deleted.

Others pretended sarcastically that they haven’t heard of YouTube, in an apparent jab at China’s Great Firewall: “What even is this site? Don’t they use Youku to watch videos?”

Beyond the droll humor, the comments show just how fast China’s vast online video services have grown over the past few years, without YouTube and Netflix in the country.

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