YouTube TV

YouTube TV DVR outage leaves some with missing recordings and unskippable ads

Ben Schoon | May 25 2023 - 7:16 am PT

If you’ve noticed some problems with recordings on YouTube TV lately, you’re not alone, as a partial DVR outage is causing some confusion, but Google is working on it.

Over the past week many YouTube TV subscribers have noticed some oddities with DVR recordings. This includes recordings simply being missing from their library. More recently, some have noticed that DVR recordings are not allowing users to skip ads, which is one of the benefits of watching content that you recorded live versus an on-demand library.

Thankfully, a YouTube TV engineer is shedding some light on the situation.

The problem apparently stems from an “incident” that first occurred last Wednesday – it’s not specified, but given the timing we assume it’s somewhat related to the issues that affected some NBA Playoff games. It’s explained that YouTube TV was “backed up” on DVR recordings as a result, and the problem is still having some effects down to today, primarily with recordings not being immediately available.

The YouTube TV engineer explains:

Folks – we tried to comment on all of these threads but it’s the same answer – we are catching up on processing a large backlog of DVRs from last week and hope to be done soon but in the meantime you may have some transient issues with some DVRs being immediately available. You can always watch VOD in the interim until they catch up but we are not putting forced ads on DVR.

Some users have noticed that, when trying to watch recorded content, ads are becoming unskippable. The engineer confirms that is not intentional. It seems, rather, that video-on-demand versions of recorded programs are being used in place of a recording in some cases. The engineer adds this “doesn’t impact most users.”