I’m going to quickly take you through a scenario I went through last night. I watch a lot of videos, right, and I post a lot of videos on the internet. Youtube is one of the places I visit most. I was going to watch some videos from the people I subscribed to. I loaded up the homepage and clicked on the first video I saw that was interesting in my feed. At which point I was greeted with this:
So after that I did the perfectly logical thing of panicking. I immediately thought about all the places I could have visited that would have given me a virus. All of the ads I may have clicked on, all the pop-ups I would have gotten from clicking on said ads. Then I shut down my computer and restarted it. I booted Safari back up and was treated with the ability to watch videos… for five minutes. After that I was given the same screen as last time (though it does change everytime you reload). At this point I was near hyperventilation. I shut the system down again and even installed all the updates I have been neglecting. Do you know what that takes for me?
I went crazy, like I need Youtube or something? I then went to sleep because for some reason I was watching videos at midnight. The next morning I still couldn’t watch videos. so I frantically searched around the internet, even going so far as to copy paste some of the gibberish into Google (which found nothing). Until I eventually found a post on a forum that was about the same problem as mine. It turns out that it kind of worked itself out for some people and it appeared to be a problem with Youtube and not my computer. I could also watch videos right after looking at this post, almost as if by magic.
My reason for writing this really is to warn you about the internet. Think about a site that you would panic if it went down (it didn’t help that Tumblr was down at the same time). See if you could go a day without it. And then begin coordinating your panic procedure, because you can’t, you know you can’t, I know you can’t, and no one else has to get hurt because of your panicking.