YouTube Premium users are hearing surprise ads on Google Home

It’s not the only perk, but it’s fair to say that most people pay for YouTube Premium to avoid the ads. If you’re one of them, an uninterrupted experience is the minimum you expect when your subscription fee leaves your account each month, so you can imagine the frustration of some Google Home users today who say that promise just got broken today.

A thread on r/googlehome highlights multiple users saying their Google Home and Nest devices began playing ads before and between tracks on YouTube Music, despite having active Premium subscriptions. The original poster, who says they’ve been subscribed since the Google Play Music days, tried power cycling their Home Hub but still heard ads.

Other commenters quickly piled in with similar complaints. Some described long, 30-second pauses between songs, tracks failing to load, or their speakers going silent before an ad kicked in. A few said their usual personalized mixes were replaced with random Top 40 tracks that didn’t match their listening history. Others couldn’t get casting from a PC to work at all, and one user said their device played an ad right after rebooting, without them even asking it to do anything. At least one person noted that YouTube Music worked fine on their phone or tablet, suggesting a problem with Google Home specifically.

There’s some official acknowledgment that these aren’t random users who forgot to pay their YouTube Premium bill. The GoogleNestCommunity account replied in the thread saying that Google is “aware of an issue with playing YouTube Music on some Google Home devices” and is investigating. The response doesn’t specifically mention ads or YouTube Premium, but its appearance in this thread certainly implies that the rogue ads are at least part of the issue being addressed.

There’s no word yet on what caused it, how widespread it is, or whether it’s linked to the CloudFlare issues that are currently dogging other services, such as Steam. For now, if your smart display suddenly forgot that you pay for your Premium experience, you can at least be assured it’s not your fault.