I don’t understand how bandwidth works very well, I’m afraid. (Or if this would even be a bandwidth issue.) But I was just trying to watch a YouTube video of Michael Jackson and noticed that it was loading extremely slowly, so I’m wondering if this could be affected by the traffic produced by the news of his death.
A popular video will be load-balanced across multiple servers, I presume. (If it doesn’t, it’s only because YouTube never faced such a massive rush to one video to necessitate this simple algorithm, but I doubt it.) Are you sure all videos weren’t slow?