My wife Fanfan alerted me just after 10:30 pm Wednesday evening Beijing time that Youku.com — one of the top three Chinese Internet video sharing sites — was unreachable. Users going to the site received the following message:

我们非常抱歉，优酷正在进行例行维护，预计将持续1小时。

·给您带来的不便优酷深感歉意，感谢您对优酷的支持！

·请耐心等待一段时间之后再来优酷Roughly, that means, “We’re very sorry, Youku is undergoing routine maintenance expected to last for one hour. Youku apologizes for any inconvenience, and thanks you for your support of Youku! Please wait for a bit and come back to Youku.”

I phoned CEO and founder Victor Koo — yes, it was past the cut-off — because I was naturally curious,  in light of the troubles being experienced by 56.com, whether this could be related. He told me that this was in fact a simple technical problem and that their tech team was working on it even as we spoke. He would not comment when I asked whether Youku’s servers may have been overloaded by spillover traffic from 56.com users. Tudou.com, meanwhile, remains stable (so I can continue to watch Season 2 of 30rock tonight).

At the time of this posting the site hasn’t been restored, but I’ll check back at 11:30 and post the status then.

At 10:56 the site is back up and running normally. Nice work guys!

Back down again as of 11:07…

Front page accessible but not all channel pages and videos available at 11:10

Whole site’s down gain at 11:16. This is getting boring, but I need closure.

11:28, all’s well that I can tell. Channels, several individual videos tested, all running at normal speed!