My 6-year-old son, Max, just scooped his journalist Dad: "The LEGO Star Wars videos are broken," he called from the office as I peck away here at the kitchen table.

Sure enough, YouTube appears to be down.

There are reports of the same nature coming from Pennsylvania, New Jersey and here in Massachusetts. Been going on for at least an hour, it would seem, maybe longer. Some people are having a hard time coping ... others are starting to freak.

(Update, 10:40 a.m.: Back up; no explanation yet as to what happened. ... Got one now; see below.)

"Seriously, its starting to scare me," writes this blogger. "If nothing else I need youtube up tonight to watch Transformers Animated and the next episode of 'From the Drawer.' "

Tin-foil hatters are conjuring up conspiracy theories, of course. Blame Hillary?

Meanwhile, Max, being the savvy Web veteran that most 6-year-olds are these days, is getting his LEGO Star Wars video fix on another site.

Me? I'm going to eat breakfast.

(Update: Trying to get some word out of Google PR ... Still haven't had breakfast.)

(Update, 10:07: Speculation about a DNS hack here.)

(Update, 11:30: From a YouTube spokesman: "The site was down for about an hour due to internal technical issues. Our engineers quickly assessed and resolved the problem." ... It was more like three hours, but let's not quibble.)