YouTube stops working periodically. How can I fix it?

September 14, 2010 12:19 PM

I've been having problems with YouTube over the last couple of days. Most of the time it works just fine, but it's freaked out a few times, and not worked for an hour or so, and then gotten better. Here's what happens: The pages looks like this (YouTube homepage), and videos won't play (annoyingly enough, page-ads play just fine). It tells me that my Flash player isn't up to date, which it is. Other flash-things work just fine, including other video sharing websites. Google Chrome is my primary browser but the same thing happens in Firefox. I've asked around and no one I know has had the same problem. What is wrong and how can I fix it?
posted by Kattullus to Computers & Internet (11 answers total)

Response by poster: Forgot to mention, I'm using a PC running Windows 7.
posted by Kattullus at 12:19 PM on September 14, 2010

I have been experiencing the same problem, Mac OS in Firefox and Safari. No answers, but you aren't alone. Also, I think your link doesn't work.
posted by BusyBusyBusy at 12:22 PM on September 14, 2010

Response by poster: Oops! Here's the pic.

Good to know I'm not alone. I guess it isn't me, then. I haven't found anything about this online though, so I thought it was a problem on my end.
posted by Kattullus at 12:30 PM on September 14, 2010

Does switching to HTML5 alleviate the problem?
posted by bjork24 at 12:41 PM on September 14, 2010

Response by poster: Nope! Switching to HTML5 doesn't change anything. Here's what a videopage looks like, incidentally.
posted by Kattullus at 12:53 PM on September 14, 2010

This is unlikely to be related, but there's a Flash security issue that isn't fixed yet: see here. So I'm not sure this is your issue, but it might be a direction to look, and it might be worth not doing flash-y things until they get a fix out.
posted by nat at 12:55 PM on September 14, 2010

It looks like the CSS file, and probably the JS, isn't loading (I'm pretty sure that would cause the mistaken "version error"). Hmm.

Does Ctrl-R (force reload) fix the issue?

If you could, try it in Chrome and open Tools->Developer Tools. Enable the resource tracking thing (under the Resources tab). Load the page. If it fails, look to see if either of these two files are listed in the graph:

www-core-vflUHkzKz.js (the end of this filename may change but it will start with www-core and end with .js)
www-core-vfl1pO9Zu.css

Also if you see a call to /csi, let me know what that URL is.

Definitely interested to find the issue here if it's something on our end.
posted by wildcrdj at 1:04 PM on September 14, 2010

Also I did just fix an issue with caching on our JS/CSS, it's still rolling through but if that was related you should stop seeing the issue. Not convinced that's it though.
posted by wildcrdj at 1:14 PM on September 14, 2010

Response by poster: Well, it's working properly now. As I mentioned, it would work sometimes and not work at other times. If it goes kerplunk again, I'll pop back into the thread.
posted by Kattullus at 1:36 PM on September 14, 2010

Sounds good. If it stays fixed it probably was related to the bug introduced last Wednesday and fixed today.
posted by wildcrdj at 1:43 PM on September 14, 2010

Actually it looks like we have a separate issue that's causing us to return 500's (errors) for some % of static content (JS, CSS, etc). That's almost certainly whats been causing this. I don't think it's fixed yet but we're on it!
posted by wildcrdj at 2:44 PM on September 14, 2010