If you’re not a YouTube Premium subscriber, chances are that you’re using an ad blocker for the streaming platform to avoid its many ads. That ad blocker could be why YouTube hasn’t loaded properly for you or many others today.

Some users took to platforms like Reddit to share their YouTube outages (via 9to5Google). While DownDetector also showcased a notable spike, indicating YouTube is experiencing problems, the root cause appears to be with the use of ad blockers on the web, and not YouTube itself.

Blank homepages and stopped videos

Users who reported the issue have mentioned that their YouTube homepage went blank or YouTube just stopped working, in one case mid-video. In other cases, selected videos just didn’t load.

People had varying success with playing YouTube in a different browser, loading it in incognito mode, and in removing ad blockers.

Not YouTube’s only problem today

YouTube engineers had their hands full today as there was also a UI bug affecting YouTube Shorts. The TikTok-like feature that is filled with short-form content suddenly showcased a stripped-down interface with like, dislike, comment, share buttons getting vanished.

This has been an issue that first popped up in September and has reoccurred for some users, but it appears unrelated to today’s ad blocker-focused problems.

A history of issues with ad blockers

Using ad blockers with YouTube has caused a variety of issues for users in the past. YouTube started warning users about possible bans since 2023 over the use of ad block software.

YouTube viewership has dropped significantly recently, with some creators reporting a 50% drop in views. YouTube itself has posited that ad blockers are at least partly to blame in all this.

While any issues that users have related to ad blockers can be resolved with purchasing a YouTube Premium subscription, Android Police has some workarounds to suggest that might work, including an Android app that lets you watch YouTube without ads and a way to automatically skip ads on mobile.

Regardless, outages will still surface as earlier today there were other issues with YouTube