Internet video site Hulu was nearly wiped off the face of the Internet yesterday, leading to widespread speculation about what had happened.

Some interesting theories included:

1. DanStasiewski: Hulu appears to be down. Should I get on the roof and wiggle the antenna?
2. JoeAnderson: Maybe bringing down Hulu.com will finally get me into the Evil League of Evil.
3. MattMusgrave: With Hulu down, productivity sky rockets.
4. benfortney: I think hulu said something bad about the chinese gov’t.
5. (and another one) benfortney: I blame the Republicans for taking out Hulu.
6. demosthe: Stale DNS cache maybe?

If you guessed #6, you’re right.

Around 6:45pm, Hulu accidentally deployed an incorrect DNS record and this change was replicated out to public DNS servers…causing all *.hulu.com domains (including the company’s email server, SVN depot, the whole kitchen sink) to “go boom”.

At least they could still tweet about it: