YouTube looks to be in an outage for some users, but it doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the platform itself, but rather a problem with ad blockers.
YouTube has been at war against ad blockers since 2023, and has remained adamant that the use of such blockers is against the platform’s rules. Yet, the use of ad blockers on YouTube remains widespread, to the point where issues affecting these users can look like a problem with YouTube itself.
That appears to be what’s going on today. Earlier this morning, a spike on DownDetector made it seem as though YouTube was experiencing a partial outage, but users quickly found out that ad blockers were to blame. Affected users saw a mostly blank webpage when trying to load up YouTube, as pictured below.
As would be the case with any outage, some users tried to access YouTube via other browsers and found that the platform started working again. The difference? Ad blockers.
While it’s hard to say that these issues were solely the cause of ad blockers, there are enough user reports of switching from a browser with a blocker enabled to one that doesn’t get in the way of ads only to find that YouTube immediately started working again.
Image: u/Critical_Score
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen YouTube issues isolated to users with an active ad blocker. Over the past year alone there have been incidents where videos were loading slowly when an ad blocker was in use – which is still happening – and ad blockers were the cause of drastically dropping view counts across the platform. The latter seems the closest to this latest issue.
Notably, there was another issue with YouTube Shorts overnight where the UI around the video – including comments, the like button, and the video description – was not showing properly. That suggests there could have been a problem on YouTube’s end, but that issue appears to be fixed this morning.
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