YouTube has stopped working for users with ad blockers
What's the story
YouTube is facing issues for some users, but the problem isn't with the platform itself. Rather, it's a problem with ad blockers. The video sharing giant has been fighting against these blockers since 2023, insisting that their use violates its policies. Despite this, many users continue to use them on YouTube, leading to problems that appear as platform outages.
Problem identification
Browser extensions caused the problem
A spike on DownDetector earlier today suggested a partial outage of YouTube. However, it was soon discovered that the issue stemmed from ad blockers. Users affected by this problem were greeted with a mostly blank webpage when trying to access YouTube. The issue was resolved when they switched to other browsers without ad blockers enabled, proving that the problem lay with these extensions and not with YouTube itself.
Recurring problems
YouTube and ad blockers don't mix well
This isn't the first time that YouTube has had problems related to active ad blockers. There have been cases where videos loaded slowly with an ad blocker enabled and view counts dropped drastically across the platform. The latter case is similar to this latest issue, highlighting a pattern of recurring problems associated with these extensions on YouTube.
Shorts glitch
YouTube Shorts also faced issues
In a related development, YouTube Shorts also faced an issue overnight. The user interface around the video, including comments, likes button and description wasn't displaying properly. This suggested a possible problem on YouTube's end but was resolved by this morning.