YouTube streams go blurry: users complain of major quality issues this past week

[Alfonso Maruccia]

Back to 2000s: Over the last week, multiple users have reported that YouTube is not meeting its usual quality standards. Some videos and Shorts display as a garbled, pixelated mess. The company is aware of the problem and is working on a fix, but does not know what is causing the quasi-outage.

Over the past few days, many viewers have reported that YouTube seems to have gone back to the digital stone age. The 20-year-old video-sharing platform struggles to provide optimal, or even moderately decent, streaming quality, resorting to the lowest video resolutions despite users having ample network bandwidth.

Some users have suffered this weird quality issue for days, degrading their watching experience to 360p and sometimes 144p resolutions. Manually bumping up the quality to 1080p has helped in some instances. However, others have found that doing that results in endless buffering. At least a fraction of users complain that YouTube simply refuses to stream at a decent quality, no matter what they do.

The issue isn't isolated to a single platform, either. Users have reported resolution issues on Windows, iOS/iPadOS, and Smart TVs. Android appears to be the only ecosystem where YouTube is still working as intended, which means smartphones and tablets based on Google's OS can currently provide the best YouTube experience. Coincidence?

Imagine trying to suffer through this when trying to watch your favorite YT content.

Not even Google seems to know what is going on with YouTube. The company acknowledged the issue on Wednesday, admitting that the platform is serving "some" users lower resolutions than usual. However, it had no further details besides those we learned from affected users. Google said it is working on a fix but did not provide a time frame when things should go back to normal.

While Mountain View tries to fix its video platform, streaming addicts could evaluate a few alternative solutions. As mentioned, YouTube should work fine on any Android device. Competing, albeit admittedly lesser, video platforms, such as Vimeo or Dailymotion, sometimes have similar content. Even Facebook could do the trick if you're desperate enough to jump in that hole. Don't forget Twitch, as well. Many gaming streamers on YouTube also have Twitch channels.

Video quality is just another thorn in the side of YouTube viewers. The platform has recently been in a tirade, forcing users to abandon their ad blockers. It has also hiked prices for Premium users while offering them a cheaper "mostly" ad-free option. From the look of things, Google is prepping users for the old cable switcheroo from the late 70s and early 80s. This bait-and-switch hooked cable subscribers with mostly ad-free content, like MTV, then dumped commercials on them on top of their premium subscription costs.

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YouTube streams go blurry: users complain of major quality issues this past week

 

[mbk34]

It usually takes me so long to wade through the adverts that I've moved on to another site before being affected by video quality.

 

[hahahanoobs]

I hear it constantly. People make mistakes.
They'll figure it out.

 

[yRaz]

Too busy worrying about monitization to provide decent service. Frankly, the quality of your service should be your number 1 marketing tool. They get all this bad publicity from their war on adblocks and then their service doesn't even work properly. I get a lot of use out of youtube, if was like $5/m or something I could pay $60 a year for it, I don't think I would mind, but they're asking far too much for what they're offering. anyone familiar with the GPU market will know the phrase, "whatever the market will bare." Well, I think the market has spoken loud and clear that their service isn't worth $15/m

 

[FaTaL]

Imagine trying to suffer through this when trying to watch your favorite YT content.

oh noooo. the humanity!
Idea. Dont'. Walk outside and stare at the sky or something.

 

[MakeMSGreatAgain]

You know... many years ago when YT was pretty new I had no issue sitting through an ad for my free video. But they they started adding more and more ads, and censoring users comments and content creators, at that point it became a big F-YOU to them and I enabled ad-blocking via FF. I will continue this practice until they DIE or until they stop screwing us. And yes $15 a month is hilarious for a subscription! $5 at most for an ad free experience. Stop censoring those you don't agree with and stop with the excessive ads - then and only then will I turn off my ad blocker.