YouTube users were in a panic a few hours ago after their subscriber counts began to drop inexplicably. It appears the service was affected by a massive outage that caused channels to lose massive numbers of subscribers in a matter of minutes.
Fortunately, the company has already fixed the problem, and subscriber counters are back to normal and working normally. Users also confirm that everything is back to normal now.
It appears that the problem stemmed from a bug that causes YouTube to delete two subscribers from a channel every time one individual opts out of the channel. This leaves the door open for you to repeatedly subscribe and unsubscribe from channels that have experienced massive subscriber losses.
BlackScreenTV was the first to spot the issue, which affected the most popular channel on YouTube – PewDiePie. Saying that this was the biggest outage in the history of the site, BlackScreenTV will be live streaming the entire process if you plan to watch the video.
Although this had been going on for a few days, it seems the bug only gained attention after PewDiePie livestreamed the bug. Given its massive reach, this was to be expected.
The situation had progressed so much that some subscribers had gone negative just because of trolls who exploited the vulnerability.
"Since Monday, in some cases, two Subscribers have been accidentally deleted instead of one. We are working on a solution!" the official @TeamYouTube account posted on Twitter.
Fortunately, since YouTube started working on the issue, no data. The correct numbers are now showing on almost all channels, so it won't be long before everything is back to normal in YouTube land.
