YouTube: Our humor, not our hack

Engineers at video upload site YouTube.com played a practical joke on fans late Thursday evening as they prepared to roll out new site features.

YouTube, which hosts homemade videos, took down the site and posted a cryptic and grammatically incorrect place-holder message written in capital letters: "All your video are belong to us."

The inability to get on to the site and the poor grammar, a likely reference to a poorly translated video game that evolved into an animated Web phenomenon some years ago, had some YouTube fans believing that the site had been hacked. At around 10:45 p.m. PT, an additional sentence appeared that let confused users in on the hoax: "No, we haven't be hacked. Get a sense of humor."

YouTube posted a note on the site at 7 p.m. PT warning users that it would be going down, said YouTube spokeswoman Julie Supan. The San Mateo, Calif.-based company has often placed humorous photographs or messages up when performing maintenance on the site.

"This is what the engineers do, they have fun with our users," Supan said. "They're all cracking up right now. You have to remember who our fan base is. They don't want some dry message."

Supan declined to reveal what site features are debuting Friday, but did say that they would not include a new advertising model. Industry insiders are waiting to see how the company presents ads to its audience of 12 million users.

The Internet's No. 1 video variety show, YouTube is facing growing competition from some big-time players. On Wednesday, Yahoo said it would launch a new video Web site in order to challenge YouTube.

Google and AOL have also jumped into the user-generated video market.

[davesacre]

History lesson - all your base

You weren't around for the "All your base are belong to us" craze,
were you? http://allyourbase.planettribes.gamespy.com/
video1_view.shtml

[brian g--2008]

"who are fan base is"

more intentional bad grammar?

[perfectblue97]

All of yor bases

To further this, the original quote "all of your bases..." was a result of a poor translation from a Japanese video game.

If you don't remember this, then you're not old enough to be surfing the web without parental supervision.

[Tomcat Adam]

17 1/2

And I don't remember it. Call my parents, quick!

[backgroundnoise]

RE:

"If you don't remember this, then you're not old enough to be surfing the web without parental supervision."

-- Or you're not a gamer, maybe? :)

[hugh dunnit]

who are they hiring??

"The inability to get on to the site and the poor grammar had some YouTube fans believing that the site had been hacked."

If you don't know what that refers to, then you shouldn't be writing on a tech website.

Take notice C|Net

[tps95]

You missed the whole point of the joke!

Go Google "All your base are belong to us" or look the phrase up in Wikipedia. This gag has been around for a long time. Follow this link for the "music video".

http://allyourbase.planettribes.gamespy.com/video1_view.shtml

[jenguevin]

'All Your Base' reference added

We've updated the story to more fully explain the "All Your Base" reference. We think the fact that not all YouTube users got the allusion was part of the reason many of them believed the site had been hacked. Thanks for all your comments on this late-breaking story.

[tps95]

Another link

This is more fun (try them all!)

http://allyourbase.planettribes.gamespy.com/video2.shtml