Having problems streaming YouTube videos? Here’s how you can solve them

December 18, 2020

By Alex Balaniuc

YouTube is a huge company with lots of loyal followers, who visit YouTube’s website every day and at every hour. Indeed, YT has an average of 30 million active users a day. Since servers are packed with people all connected at the same time, of course issues are going to show up. YouTube video streaming issues could also be due to your device malfunctioning, or due to your poor internet connection. These are the messages that you encounter whenever YouTube – or your connection – goes down:

“An error has occurred”
“Playback error. Tap to retry”
“Connection to server lost”
“This video is unavailable”
“Something went wrong. Tap to Retry”

How to troubleshoot your internet and device connection

After acknowledging that there are some malfunctions with the video streaming platform, you can follow these instructions and see if they can help you out.

Check your internet speed

First of all, know that your home or mobile network’s quality affects how smoothly YouTube videos play, and whether videos play in HD. Under this paragraph, you’ll see a table that shows the approximate speeds recommended to play each video format. The actual speed that your device gets may vary from the number you see when you run an Internet speed test. This difference is caused by factors like WiFi performance, time of day, and how your ISP connects to YouTube. If there are multiple devices on your network – yours, your sibling’s, your friend’s – then the connection is shared between them, so the speed that your device gets will be inevitably reduced.

Video Resolution	Recommended sustained speed
4K	20 Mbps
HD 1080p	5 Mbps
HD 720p	2.5 Mbps
SD 480p	1.1 Mbps
SD 360p	0.7 Mbps

Computer:

if you have many browser tabs open, try to close most of them, except the YouTube one
restart your browser, your router and your computer
update the browser to the latest version
there’s a smaller chance of these YouTube issues happening if you use Chrome

Android & iOS\iPadOS:

The instructions below are both for the YouTube app and the mobile site.

YouTube APP:

restart the app, as well as your device
turn off and on your mobile data connection
clear the YouTube app’s cache (learn how to here)
uninstall and reinstall the YouTube app
update to the newest available version of the YouTube app (go here), and to the newest available version of Android (go here)

YouTube MOBILE SITE:

restart your mobile browser
restart your device, and you’re done

Smart TV, videogame consoles and Chromecast

If you’re using YouTube from a Smart TV, a game console or a Chromecast device, try these steps:

restart the YouTube app
now, restart your device: hard restart (disconnect power and reconnect)
for game consoles: uninstall and reinstall the YouTube app
if nothing noted above works, then update your device’s firmware/system software