If you have been struggling with poor video quality on YouTube, your perfectly usable internet connection has not to be blamed. It’s all on YouTube, which is now working to address the issue.
While it’s difficult to estimate the scale of the problem, too many people have taken to forums, such as Reddit, to report video quality similar to that we used to see in 2009. Reports on DownDetector also appear to have spiked over the last 24 hours.
What is YouTube doing about it?
YouTube recently acknowledged that a bug in YouTube was causing videos to launch in low quality even with high-speed and reliable internet connections. While some videos are streaming in 144p or 360p, switching to a higher quality may result in buffering.
On a support page, a Google representative confirmed the team was “actively looking into this.” Besides long-form videos, Shorts seem to be affected by the bug too.
More annoyingly, these issues are not limited to one platform, and Google confirms the impacted ones include iOS, desktop, and smart TVs. For now, Android users appear spared from the issue.
The exact cause behind the issue cannot be isolated, and is understandably frustrating. Many people claim to have gone to length to be able to watch YouTube like normal, by updating the app, updating to the latest iOS version, and even offloading the app and reinstalling it again. Nothing, however, appears to fix it.
It is further reported that the app chooses to play videos in low quality even when you have chosen higher quality as your preference in YouTube’s advanced settings. And even when the quality is manually set to HD or higher, the video supposedly returns to lower settings shortly after, and scrubbing the video’s timeline has the same effect.
The bug is imaginably annoying, especially considering how many of us rely on YouTube for our daily dose of information, entertainment, motivation, etc. While the official acknowledgement is assuring, we hope Google fixes it soon enough before we turn feverish.
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