NEW YORK, (

TheStreet

) - Google's popular YouTube's homepage was down briefly Thursday though videos on the site were still available through other routes.

Users early Thursday saw a blank page with a service unavailable message instead of the usual YouTube greeting page. But individual videos were available through YouTube.

The outage comes a day after parent Google suffered a "bug" on its executive bio pages. The text next to executive photos was written in Chinese characters for a short time Wednesday. Google said the problem was not a hack of its site, but referred to it as a bug, according to the

Guardian

.

The bug and now the down YouTube homepage don't appear to have any direct connection to Google's decision Monday to

redirect its search traffic in China to Hong Kong

. However, observers are naturally concerned that

Google's high-profile political stance against censorship

will cause a backlash and possible interruptions to its operations.

Google shares were up $3.11 to $560.44 in premarket trading Thursday.

--Written by Scott Moritz in New York.