> My favorite bit of Googleism: Go to any site you sign in with Google SSO and watch the URLs in the eight redirects it has to do before it signs you in. You'll see a "youtube.com" in there. Even on a Workspace account. Youtube.com is a load-bearing website in their core auth flows.
I assume that's just because they need to set a cookie on the YouTube domain in case you visit YouTube later on the workspace account, and not "load bearing"in the manner you insinuate
If the youtube.com 302 failed to itself 302 back to the next destination; because the site is down; would that not be load bearing?
You do not hit YouTube directly. You hit Google's frontend server which then does internal routing. Likely it would be able to route around it. Or rather, the auth part of YouTube is not the same as all of the other parts of YouTube. For big tech companies like Google, a website is not one single binary that serves requests, but a ton of services handling different things (and some of those services being caching so it doesn't show things down as you might think). It is highly unlikely that the main services comprising YouTube as a video streaming site would bring down Google auth