What You Get in Return for That YouTube TV Outage

Google’s apologizing for last week’s outage across YouTube-branded services with more than a written statement. YouTube, YouTube Music, and YouTube TV went down and remained unusable for almost two hours. While that’s not a long period of time, these are services relied on by a massive number of people around the world. Now there’s a remedy for at least one of them.

In an email, the Mountain View-based company announced it’ll offer an entire week of access to YouTube TV for free. Anyone with an active subscription can claim $10 after completing a form.

Here’s the note sent out to all users:

“We’re sorry for the unexpected YouTube TV interruption on October 16. We love our TV as much as you do, and our goal is to make sure that you can access your events and shows — whenever and however you want. To help make this right, we’d like to give you a week of free service.”

The two-hour outage didn’t come on a quiet night, either. Between entertainment and sports, there was plenty of must-watch programming to catch.

Aside from MLB’s National League Championship Series, the NBA kicked off its 2018-2019 campaign with flashy matchups. On the entertainment side, NBC’s The Voice and This Is Us as well as ABC’s The Conners were drawing a significant amount of eyeballs. But YouTube TV users saw little of it.

YouTube TV’s estimated to have around 800,000 subscribers. Even though it’s not leading in the live TV streaming space, that’s a healthy number to be leaving in the dark for any amount of time.

If you didn’t get an email with the form, get in touch with YouTube TV’s customer service team as soon as possible. Google requires that you claim the credit by Wednesday, October 24. Otherwise, you missed out and won’t get $10 taken off your monthly bill. So get moving, folks.

YouTube and YouTube Music weren’t mentioned, though. Google’s not talking about any remedies for them, so it looks like users on these services are settling for an apology.