Joe Maring / Android Authority
TL;DR
- There were thousands of reports of YouTube being down earlier today.
- It turns out that YouTube is working fine.
- The problem is that the platform rolled out a big anti-ad blocker update.
YouTube has long been at war with ad blockers, implementing various measures to get users to turn off their extensions. As a result, we occasionally see some users report that an ad blocker has stopped working on the website. This time, however, it appears that YouTube has rolled out a big update that made the website unusable for a large number of viewers who have their ad blockers enabled.
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Around 12:00 AM today, reports of YouTube being down began to spike on Downdetector. But it wasn’t until around 6:00 AM that those reports jumped into the thousands. While it seemed like YouTube went offline, users quickly realized that wasn’t the case.
As it turns out, YouTube was still working just fine. The actual root of the problem is that YouTube is once again cracking down on ad blockers. Over on Reddit (via Windows Central), users have sleuthed out a few of the old solutions that have been affected. There are several mentions of the Opera GX browser and its built-in ad blocker having problems with YouTube. Another user also suggests that you won’t be able to use YouTube with an ad blocker if you’re on a Chromium browser and signed into your account.
It appears that you can still use the popular video platform with an ad blocker if you’re using Firefox and aren’t signed in. Microsoft’s Edge browser also appears to be safe from today’s crackdown. And it looks like uBlock Origin still works just fine.
This latest crackdown comes on the heels of a recent change to YouTube’s mobile ads. A few days ago, it was spotted that the app removed the close-out button from side panel ads. As a result, you can no longer dismiss a side panel ad while viewing a horizontal ad on mobile.
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