I am starting to learn blockchain development. Still a newbie, but here are my two cents.
For a centralized site like YouTube, you can blame YouTube (or Google, since they own YouTube). That's fair enough. For a decentralized site like peakd.com, sometimes there are parts of the system they have no control over because someone else independantly controls a part they rely on to make their thing work.
Next time, you might try switching the API node in peakd's settings. That will often fix the kinds of problems you seemed to have had.