This YouTube ad glitch is wrecking the viewing experience

This YouTube ad glitch is wrecking the viewing experience By  Chethan Rao Published 19 minutes ago

Chethan is a reporter at Android Police, focusing on the weekend news coverage for the site. He has covered tech for over a decade with multiple publications, including the likes of Times Internet, Guiding Tech, and Android Headlines, to name a few.  Chethan's love for Android dates back to the days of the Samsung/Google Nexus S, with his first Android phone being the HTC Desire HD back in 2010.    Away from work, he's on the lookout for live cricket streams or NBA highlights. He also enjoys the occasional hour or two of console/mobile gaming whenever time permits.

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The ad-supported YouTube experience has only gotten worse over the years. Whether it's pushing hours of ads to some or making the skip button disappear, free users of the platform have navigated the changes patiently so far. However, a new bug in YouTube ads is stretching that patience to the limit.

As reported by a Reddit user, an ad for a Google Play app starts loading when opening a YouTube video, but it gets stuck at the buffering stage, thereby leaving you waiting endlessly. As a result, the affected user has to leave the video or close the app and play it again.

To make matters worse, another impacted user reports that this specific glitchy advert returns "every other" ad break, leading them to close and reopen the video, hoping for a different ad to appear each time. This can be a pretty irritating exercise if you're someone who binge-watches YouTube videos.

PiunikaWeb has compiled several additional reports from users across Reddit, highlighting the gravity of this particular problem.

Any remedy appears to be short-lived

At least one user found that a viable way to fix this problem was to block the ad from appearing via the three-dot button in the ad description, though even that may not work consistently.

The comments on some of the Reddit threads we mentioned above indicate that this issue is not isolated to a handful of users. However, I was unable to replicate it on the YouTube app for Android. This suggests the bug may likely be affecting YouTube viewers in a particular region of the world, though we're unable to confirm that right now.

The advert that keeps popping up repeatedly is for an app by Hypernova Limited. Curiously, this ad glitch doesn't occur with any other product that runs ads on YouTube.

As for affected users, it's clear that short of waiting for YouTube to fix this issue, getting YouTube Premium may be a more suitable long-term solution to eliminate ads from the experience.

A similar issue was reported by iOS users back in July, so perhaps YouTube can use some of that knowledge to address this particular episode.

Since this bug was uncovered only by late Sunday, YouTube hasn't had the chance to publicly confirm or acknowledge its existence. But as it appears to be widespread enough already, we don't think YouTube can stay quiet for too long.

Are you facing this glitch on the YouTube app?

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