YouTube has certainly proven itself to be a bit of a pain for viewers lately, especially those members of its audience attempting to bypass ads. Today’s issue takes it to a whole new level, though, as some users are struggling to use the site without seeing repeated CAPTCHAs blocking access to videos.
According to multiple reports across Reddit and DownDetector, some YouTube viewers are running into frequent CAPTCHA tests when attempting to access the site. These tests are relatively basic — utilizing first-gen word-based CAPTCHA puzzles rather than newer tests that typically rely on image recognition — but because they’re appearing repeatedly, actually browsing the site seems to be borderline impossible. The warning itself seems to be in error as well, with shared screenshots simply showing a generic “unusual traffic” warning as the cause behind these interruptions.
Affected users don’t seem to have a specific factor in common that would be causing these puzzles to appear. One user based in Germany specifically said they don’t use a VPN, something that often causes these sorts of traffic warnings to appear in places like Google’s search engine results. Another user attempted to switch their DNS to Google’s Public DNS, and though it initially worked, the problem eventually reappeared. And perhaps the most obvious potential culprit of all — ad blockers — also seem innocent in this case, with one poster specifically saying they’d disabled their extension while still experiencing incessant CAPTCHAs.
For now, the problem seems fairly limited to the web version of YouTube, with multiple comments pointing towards mobile apps as working fine. It’s also worth noting that this issue, though certainly somewhat widespread, isn’t affecting all users; I’ve been unable to replicate the issue, both when logged into YouTube and in an Incognito session. If you’re experiencing this bug, your best bet might be to turn to mobile for now. Otherwise, you’ll have to keep waiting for Google to roll out a fix.
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