YouTube

YouTube ad blocker war continues as comments and video descriptions go missing

Ben Schoon | Feb 16 2026 - 6:35 am PT

A number of YouTube users are reporting missing comments and video descriptions, and it appears to be yet another result of the continued war on ad blockers.

Over the past several months, YouTube has heavily cracked down on ad blockers. But, as per usual, it’s a cat-and-mouse game where one block works until a new workaround is discovered, and the back-and-forth just continues on.

A side effect that’s been noticed throughout the continued war is that, on occasion, certain features break or disappear, and we’re now seeing another one of those.

In the past few days, a number of YouTube users have taken to Reddit and elsewhere (h/t PiunikaWeb), noting that all of the videos that they are watching have comments turned off and lack a video description. While it’s not all that uncommon to stumble into videos with comments disabled, it is unusual for that to be the case everywhere.

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While the exact cause is unknown, the common thread is the use of ad blockers.

There are, of course, two main possibilities. Firstly, YouTube could be purposefully disabling comments and video descriptions for users with ad blockers. That’s the assumption many have jumped to. But it could also be caused by the ad blockers, as we’ve seen with past examples of how changes within ad blockers can affect YouTube. Late last year, for instance, a change within a popular ad blocker led to “view-pocolypse” as many YouTube creators noticed sharp drops in their view counts, as the ad blockers were preventing the view from properly counting towards the video.

In either case, this is a frustrating issue, as comments are one of the core forms of engagement for YouTube videos between audiences and creators – then agian, creators likely aren’t all that keen to have a portion of their audience made up of viewers who are actively blocking the main form of monetization.