Why yewtu.be was down? (July 2023)

what-happened-downtime-july2023.md

On the 30th of June, my cloud provider, Oracle Cloud, decided to shutdown all my servers hosted on two Oracle Cloud accounts.
It is known that this provider will randomly ban accounts without any reason.

Why yewtu.be doesn't accept new registrations nor logging into an account?

Unfortunately and this is 100% my fault for forgetting that, I only had data duplication between servers located in the two Oracle Cloud accounts and no backups.
I thought that I wouldn't get all my accounts in trouble at the same time and able to recover the data from one of the two accounts but unfortunately this turned out otherwise.

Implementing some backup was something I had in my notes for a long time but I think I forgot about it, maybe due to the huge amount of work I spend on the open source projects.
I'm deeply sorry if you have lost your subscriptions list or playlists or watch history. I did try to contact Oracle Cloud for recovering the data, I'm waiting for their answer but you should be certain that they will most likely ignore me.

So as of now and in order to not have the responsability of keeping the data of my users somewhere safe I won't accept new registrations on yewtu.be. You can use yewtu.be normally like before but without an account.
If you are looking for making an account on Invidious, please use other instances: https://instances.invidious.io or install Invidious locally on your computer: https://docs.invidious.io/installation/

Why it took so long for yewtu.be to be available again?

Well first I had to find new servers, set up them. I have a complex infrastructure for handling the many users that I receive every day.

Second that was something I have wanted to do for a long time. Rework from scratch my infrastructure for an easier way of managing it.
In more technical terms, rework my Kubernetes infrastructure.

(Finally mentally recover from all of these events, especially the lost of my users data, by going on a hike for a full day)

why did you disable the popular tab?

@foodornt Popular videos are based on subscriptions of the registered users in the instance

Thanks you so much for putting the work to keep it alive!

can you open registration anyway? Here's why it's a good idea to do so:

1. People like invidious mostly because they can have some type of subscription without having a Youtube account, so an invidious instance without registration isn't as useful.
2. The database was lost before and I think we all understand it could happen again. You are not obliged to keep data safe if you're not getting paid to do so.
3. We can always have a backup somewhere else. I personally use 3 instances anyway just for uptime so I had my subscriptions already backed up on 2 other instances, but I'd like to use yours regularly again as well. Right now I don't because I don't have registration here.

Hope you bring back registration. Thanks.

You can create a temporary playlist without registration on YouTube with the following url: "https://www.youtube.com/watch_videos?video_ids=" add the video IDs (the string after "v=") to the end with no spaces, with a comma in between & paste the url into the address bar. I believe you can substitute an invidious instance for the YouTube domain too, & it will still work.

There's a site "https://www.playlist.ws/" that will do it for you through drag & drop. You can even save playlists on the site & they can be backed up (JSON, I think). You can even give it a name.

edit: the site layout has changed. There doesn't seem to be a backup option & restore doesn't work, but you can still back them up in a text file, or as bookmarks.