What you need to know
- YouTube streams are looking grainy and blurry, even with good internet, so it's likely a platform issue, not your connection.
- Videos are dropping to 144p or 360p, making them unwatchable, and manually bumping the quality to 1080p or higher seems to result in endless buffering.
- YouTube's support team says they’re aware of the lower than usual video quality for videos and Shorts.
YouTube users are noticing a big drop in video quality, with streams looking grainy and less sharp than usual. What’s weird is that this is happening even when their internet is perfectly fine, which points to something going on with YouTube’s streaming system.
For the past few days, people have been flooding places like Reddit with complaints about YouTube videos looking terrible (via Android Authority). Even with good internet, streams keep dropping to super low resolutions like 144p or 360p, making everything super blurry and basically unwatchable.
Attempts to manually switch to 1080p or better just lead to endless buffering, which is extra annoying when you know your internet can handle it.
YouTube’s official support team has admitted there’s a weird glitch messing with video quality. "We're aware some of you are experiencing lower than usual video quality when trying to watch Videos and Shorts," a YouTube representative wrote on the support page.
iOS, desktop, smart TVs are hit the hardest
The quality drop seems to be hitting iOS, desktop, and smart TV users the most, while the YouTube app on Android phones and tablets is running just fine, as noted by Android Authority.
Nobody’s quite sure what’s causing the video quality drop, but it doesn’t seem to be a widespread meltdown. Reports are popping up on Downdetector, but as Android Police points out, the number of complaints isn’t wildly above the usual daily noise.
Hopefully, YouTube sorts this out faster than Google did with the recent Chromecast glitch, which left second-gen Chromecast and Chromecast Audio users waiting days for a fix.
To stay in the loop on the latest updates, users should keep an eye on the YouTube Help page, where YouTube has promised to share any new info as it comes in.
