YouTube fixes bizarre bug that wouldn’t let anyone chat in English

YouTube experienced an odd bug yesterday. A YouTube Help forum thread shows that more than 1,600 users reported they weren’t able to send messages in the platform’s live chats — but seemingly, only English-language messages were affected.

As reported by TechRadar, the bug’s since been resolved. But for a period of time yesterday, it seems some or all YouTube users were only able to send messages in live chats that didn’t include English words. It’s not clear what caused the bug.

While the issue was ongoing, messages written in non-English languages, messages that only contained emojis, and messages composed entirely of gibberish were apparently sent as normal, while chat messages written in English were filtered out and not displayed. This applied to both standard chat messages and paid Super Chat messages.

YouTube’s since cleared it up and live chats on the platform should be back to normal today. We don’t know what caused the bug (YouTube hasn’t commented), but TechRadar speculates the issue may have been related to the platform’s overzealous AI-powered content moderation, noting that yesterday’s widespread bug was an especially notable example of messages that don’t violate any policies being filtered out. Without an official cause, that seems as plausible an explanation as any.

YouTube has been acting up in odd ways this month. Last week, it was reported that YouTube viewers using ad blockers weren’t able to see comments or video descriptions, even users subscribed to YouTube Premium. That was presumably an intentional play to combat the use of ad blockers; yesterday’s bug seems unrelated.