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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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
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?"
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!"