YouTube Discloses Glitch That Caused Subscriber Counts To Plummet This Week

YouTube disclosed yesterday evening that a glitch had besieged its platform beginning on Monday, whereupon unsubscriptions from certain channels were accidentally counted as two subscriber losses. YouTube assured users on Twitter, however, that “no actual subscribers are lost, it’s only the count that is incorrect at the moment.”

Though creators balked at the news, YouTube said it was working on a fix.

The Next Web reports that the issue appeared to have been corrected as of early this morning, though YouTube has yet to officially announce that things are back to normal. Nevertheless, the glitch caused some consternation within the community — especially as trolls took advantage of the glitch by subscribing to certain channels and then unsubscribing, knowing that it would cause their subscriber counts to plummet, according to The Next Web. As a result, some channels even ended up with negative subscriber counts.

The bug was first spotted by drama channel BlackScreenTV, which launched a live stream to display the falling subscription counts of PewDiePie, h3h3productions, Tana Mongeau, and other affected creators in real-time.

YouTube has dealt with several other bugs in recent months. In January, it copped to a glitch that could have caused lifetime view counts on creators’ ‘About’ pages to display inflated figures. And in June, YouTube said it discovered another bug that prevented changes in subscriber counts from being accurately displayed.

More recently, many viewers have complained that they are being unsubscribed from channels unwittingly, and also claiming that videos from certain creators are not showing up in their subscription feeds. However, YouTube has said that nothing is amiss in this respect.