YouTube TV

YouTube TV froze during Heat-Celtics game, still experiencing issues

Abner Li | May 17 2023 - 9:39 pm PT

Earlier this evening, YouTube TV stopped working during Game 1 of the Eastern Conference Finals between the Miami Heat and Boston Celtics. Some issues remain going into the evening.

Officially, YouTube TV experienced “elevated rebuffing rates” during the game on TNT that resulted in reports of frozen feeds, dropped audio, and even commercials failing. Many noted how the stream was behind and far from being live.

This appears to have occurred nationwide regardless of your internet speeds and across various devices from televisions to desktop web and the mobile apps. As it was happening, the YouTube TV team said it was aware of the issues and “working on a fix.” However, it did not make a difference and the viewing experience was impacted for many.

As a workaround, people downloaded the TNT app and signed in with YouTube TV. This worked for some users, but others that did this later encountered a “This app has reached its sign-in rate limit for now” error.

(For what it’s worth, there were no issues on Tuesday night for Game 1 of the Western Conference Finals between the Los Angeles Lakers and Denver Nuggets.)

Meanwhile, the issue still persists and appears to have spread to other channels later on in this evening. At 9:22 p.m. PT, TeamYouTube on Twitter said that you might “experience an issue when watching content on multiple channels via YTV.”