A recent glitch in YouTube led channel owners to lose massive number of subscribers suddenly.
This bug resulted in widespread panic among users; however, a recent update by the YouTube team has succeeded in fixing the issue.
What Did The Bug Do?
The bug resulted in YouTube miscalculating the unsubscribe functionality. Every time a single user unsubscribed from a channel, the glitch would cause YouTube to count it as two unsubscribes.
This would not have been very noticeable either if certain users did not start trolling other users by repeatedly subscribing and unsubscribing from their channel. The glitch resulted in a huge number of subscriber count being lost by channels, which worried some YouTube users.
This glitch was first reported by a YouTuber named BlackScreenTV, who also streamed a video showing his own subscriber count going down rapidly.
Users all around the world grew concerned and the YouTube team had to convince them that the problem was temporary and that they were not losing actual subscribers but just the count.
Popular YouTuber PewDiePie was also hit by this glitch and he lost many of his over 50 million subscribers. In fact, it was only after PewDiePie reported the glitch by uploading a video on his channel reporting the issue that YouTube sent out this tweet.
Yikes! Starting Monday, in some cases, we accidentally started counting two unsubs for the price of one. We’re working on a fix!
— Team YouTube (@TeamYouTube) 8 February 2017
Was There Permanent Damage?
Even though the YouTube team started working on the issue after a long while, there has been no report of permanent subscriber loss. Most users have reported that all their subscribers are now back on their channels. After the glitch was fixed, YouTube tweeted the following:
Sub counts are now fixed! We incorrectly showed a decrease of 2 instead of 1. No additional ppl were actually unsubbed. Sorry everyone! https://t.co/2v0XcsijMN — Team YouTube (@TeamYouTube) 9 February 2017
Although, the issue has been fixed, it was considered to be one of the worst, if not the worst, glitch to have hit the video streaming website since its inception in 2005.
While this time no major problem occurred, such glitches may in the future affect a channel permanently. Many YouTuber's like PewDiePie make their living through their channels on YouTube and these kinds of bugs would clearly be a terrifying prospect.
It must also be noted how quickly people started trolling the users by using the problem. This was mainly why there was so much panic because users really believed that they were losing a huge number of their subscribers suddenly and without any cause.
Photo: Rego Korosi | Flickr
