YouTube Says It Repaired Glitch Resulting In Diminished Viewcounts Yesterday

Updated on 12/21 at 10:30 am with a statement from YouTube.

If you noticed that your YouTube viewership looked noticeably sluggish in real-time yesterday morning, the platform acknowledged that it had repaired a bug that was causing “lower-than-normal views” to appear in YouTube Analytics and on watch pages.

YouTube tweeted yesterday morning that the issue affected creators during a two-hour window. Hours later, it confirmed that the glitch had been repaired. “Views are working properly again,” YouTube wrote in its Help Forums, “but we’re unable to recover the data lost during this two-hour period. This means you will likely continue to see slightly lower views and watch time numbers in your watch time reports for Dec. 19.”

That latter revelation caused some creators to wonder whether the glitch ad earnings during the brief window were impacted. “Does this also mean ad plays and revenue are permanently lost during this period?” asked gamer ThinkNoodles, who counts 4 million subscribers. YouTube tells Tubefilter that the lower view displays did not impact creator revenues.

This isn’t the only technical issue that YouTube has sought to redress recently. Last week, YouTube announced a platform-wide purge of spam subscribers, raising eyebrows by stating that some creators “may see a noticeable decrease in your subscriber count” as a result.