Reply #130: Looks like they exceeded their account limits.

[Xithras]

I thought it was suspicious that the site went down too, but it looks like they have a shared hosting plan with Yahoo. It's standard Yahoo practice that when a client exceeds the bandwidth they've paid for, the site gets shut down until more bandwidth is purchased. I would guess that the sudden rush of viewers for this video pushed them over their bandwidth limit, so Yahoo cut them off.

Before you attack Yahoo over this, remember WHY they do it...the case of an infamous Slashdotting victim. Many years ago some poor sap had a small back bedroom business and one of those $99 a month hosting plans that got him XGb of transfer allowance. He posted a video or something that made it onto Slashdot, and his traffic exploded as their several hundred thousand viewers all clicked the link to his page. When the guy got his bill the next month, he had something like $30,000 in bandwidth charges, which absolutely broke him. There was a campaign to get his host to waive the charges, but he ended up paying a substantial portion of it.

The case became fairly well known at the time, and following that most hosting providers changed their models to start cutting people off when allowed transfer limits are exceeded. It looks like that may be the case here as well.