  The aim of the present letter is to critically review the stability of the
Bartnik-McKinnon solutions of the Einstein-Yang-Mills theory. The stability
question was already studied by several authors, but there seems to be some
confusion about the nature and the number of unstable modes. We suggest to
distinguish two different kind of instabilities, which we call `gravitational'
respectively `sphaleron' instabilities. We claim that the $n^{\rm th}$
Bartnik-McKinnon solution has exactly $2n$ unstable modes, $n$ of either type.
