Chinese Youtube, 56.com has spent the past month offline due to unspecified “server maintenance problems” although we’ve been hearing alot of speculation regarding why the site is down.

The company’s competitors have told us, that they believe the video-sharing service has been shut down by the Chinese authorities for copyright infringement or some other high crime. If this is true then the $30 million invested into the company by Disney’s Steamboat Ventures, Susquehanna International Group, Hikari Private Equity, Sequoia China, Adobe Systems and CID Group has simply vapourized.

However, this doesn’t seem to be the case because having previously greeted visitors with a message which just blamed the outage on technical problems the company has now added some cute aliens and a promise to return, soon.

Translation from Chinese:

We are coming back to earth soon. Our system maintenance is already nearing completion, and the service will be returning soon. Please tell your friends about the news. Thank you for your support during this time. We’re looking forward to meeting you again. Thank you!

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!