YouTube seems to be down | Hacker News Reader

YouTube seems to be down

youtube.com

144 pointsalexpadula70 comments

These problems likely stem from Google's latest attempt to nuke NewPipe, PipePipe et al.

Just had a message from PipePipe. Quote:

"Announcement

##251016

YouTube has just rolled out an update that effectively blocks our current implementation for video stream extraction. This affects both anonymous and authenticated (login based) fetching. We are actively working on a solution. Thank you for your patience!"

Ads seem to be still working. If you have the patience to reload non working videos. So there’s that.

So in the stats it will look like a case where the revenues remained steady but the bandwidth costs went down. Great success :)

Probably programmed in to be like that.

Task failed successfully - YouTube.

Ads also have a tendency to load at higher quality even when there are bandwidth restrictions on cellular networks. We're all being forced to watch 360p videos on our $100/month cellphone plan, but somehow everybody is aligned to give us 4k ads, and waste our battery and bandwidth.

You should probably just switch to using Firefox on Android or Orion on iOS and just use ublock origin

It’s amusing but playing devil’s _ad_vocate: isn’t this just a sign of a really well-engineered e2e system? It certainly tells you where the most bullet-proofing (aka sev follow-ups completed) has occurred.

Can't manage to play any videos on mobile, web nor android TV. I thought it was my VPN at first but no seems legit.

Love it when the ads load but the video you wanted to watch won't load.

That's a good one :') ha, they got those ads to serve but not the desired content

I love it when the ads don't load therefore blocking the video completely instead of going past them.

That explains the playback errors I started getting around an hour ago. Wasn't sure what was going on, but I didn't think it was a wider outage since I did after a couple of minutes manage to get it to playback a video I wanted to watch.

Yeah it's working for some and not working for others as the network is split across many regions I'm guessing. Was down for an hour for me as well.

I guess I might actually go to bed at a reasonable hour tonight then...

I thought I could crack a book or write something but It's rather entertaining watching all the peoples reactions.

Haha yes you and me both. These shorts are horrible. I know everyone hates on them, but they are brain crack for me and I can watch them for hours.

I'm pretty sure they devastate your ability to focus though. I really notice it when I've been watching heavily. Something like chronic weed smoking in effect.

I never got on tiktok thank goodness.

And no I'm I'm not going to pretend I watch a lot of enlightening long form documentaries. It's all a guy in Pakistan making gears followed by a dog falling off a boat followed by a short clip from a movie and I don't recall any of it 30 seconds later. Pure brain eating dopamine.

Honest question: Why do you keep it on your phone then? If some habit had this bad of an effect on me I’d be going to lengths to cut it out of my life.

It's almost like breaking bad habits is hard.

The parent commenter isn’t trying to break a habit. They said they enjoy it and choose to do it. I’m asking why they do that despite the extreme negative effects they note.

Because I enjoy it! Maybe I should have made that point stronger in my original post.

It's way better than watching silly movies or playing video games (which I never got into for some reason).

But it does require heavy moderation. Under half an hour in the evening only seems to be fine.

really soul crushing to realize YouTube needs to go down to see how I default to opening it

Site is accessible but videos won't play (NYC)

Not sure if it's related, but looks like the controls are now transparent overlays?

Edit: videos a bit slow to load, but now working again as of 8:02pm EST

Some are reporting homepage partially loading as well.

My videos are playing like slideshows.

In New Zealand: https://www.nzherald.co.nz/technology/youtube-outage-hits-us...

Doom-scrolling through shorts, about half of them display an error. So the playout end must be partly down.

Oh yeah partially for sure, Google has such a strong and large network, a full outage is doubtful, partial is more realistic for sure.

Seems to be working for me in Canada as of 20:21 EST on web and mobile, I can go through multiple and videos are loading well. It seems for the the partial outage lasted about 1 hour. I confirmed with other family households and their YouTube is working again as well.

Just a theory: They seem to put in a temporary fix, it seems some videos just skip and don't play like they can't load and then get skipped. Odd, not sure. Will see what others say.

No Vodafone two days ago and now no YouTube. I am amazed at these system wide outages.

I thought YouTube cached all the recommendations fairly locally with a box at the Telco. Clearly this is not the case if it is down for everyone, everywhere.

I've never heard that, I think you may be thinking of Netflix and their edge storage appliances.

Both can be true. There are many moving parts on something like YouTube! (Edit: but yeah, I'm not sure if local caching is really feasible for YT with the huge diversity of content on the platform. Maybe "within 500 miles" is as good as one could expect)

As of 19:50 EST the issue is still apparent from what I can tell.

Whew, thought they finally axed my beloved Brave browser.

I'm sure we all went through a phase of like "What did they axe?" I thought it was my VPN.

living in a country where internet access to certain sites is either restricted or blocked from the site, you always wonder on any outage, which side caused it this time.

in this case i thought maybe i had a bad IP that youtube didn't like and desperately tried reconnecting my router hoping to get assigned a different IP.

yes at first I assumed this was part of the tit for tat ublock war

They seem to have figured out how to disrupt Brave by running a script that eventually hangs the tab

Youtube Music doesn't auto-play the next track in a radio. On the web, some videos display an error on load, but become viewable once refreshed.

I was getting the lowest res in auto mode on mobile this afternoon (~10 hrs ago), had to manually select higher res. Maybe something was brewing.

oh, and I wondered if they pushed a massive update to the player breaking NewPipe, they just broke everything, nice

Fixed? Mine was broken half an hour ago (USA/CO), but now bideos that didn't work are playing.

Doesnt seem so.

Mine works. I guess it's fixed? Maybe at least partially or locally.

We had some trouble casting YouTube to the TV just now. I checked downdetector on a hunch and yup.

Can't even remember a YouTube outage (would be tied to Google in some way).

Seems fine here - uk

Also wow I had forgotten how obnoxious yt is on a phone. Usually on an adblocked pc

I'm visiting the UK and it's down in this area.

using the g**gle frontend is downright miserable, it seemingly changes every week and ublock filters to remove shorts/recommendations/algoslop break. thank god for invidious and newpipe

Do the paid subscribers get compensated for the loss of service?

I'm guessing they don't.

Every time YouTube has problems, I'm like "why YouTube doesn't try hard to work properly on my Firefox with uBlock origin, sponsorblock, and dozen of conflicted plugins? Are they stupid?"

Same I thought it was my adblock and SponsorBlock causing the videos to not load.

The 'outage', could have been a 'adblock test successful'.

Are there other Google services down, or just YouTube?

Seems to be just YouTube but others would be able to tell us.

In other news, global productivity measures have mysteriously increased significantly in the last 25 minutes.

yeah my watch later play list keeps stopping and the wife just rang me asking why her youtube music keeps crashing.

Same for me. Videos don’t load, errors out

Thankfully there is still tumblr

man i got my food ready and everything how am i supposed to eat now

It's up in Japan

Up again.

Living in South korea, youtube is down here too. Sad that I have to touch grass instead of doomscrolling in my comfy bed.

It now loads, but errors everywhere

i got my food and everything man

Now I have to hang out with my children :-(

:') can be the best time, imagine no power and just candles! Can be worse

Spooky treehouse storytime telling competition...

Now my children have to hang-out with me! :) Oh rats, Minecraft still works...

Yet another reminder to download your favorite videos before YouTube goes down again or they get deleted or privated, or whatever.

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