Experiencing issues with YouTube video quality? It's not just you

Summary

YouTube is investigating an issue which is causing low video quality on iOS devices, desktops, and smart TVs.
Users on Reddit are reporting videos stuck at 144p, despite having a strong internet connection.
The issue seems to be primarily affecting users on iOS, and reinstalling the app doesn’t help.

If you’re having issues with YouTube videos and Shorts stuck streaming at a low resolution, you’re not alone.

In a recent help forum update, YouTube announced that it is looking into a problem resulting in “lower than usual video quality” on iOS devices, desktops, and smart TVs. Those impacted may find their videos stuck at 144p or 360p resolutions, even with a reliable internet connection, along with persistent buffering when attempting to switch to a higher resolution. This issue appears to mainly affect iOS users.

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Live TV: No

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Users are getting frustrated

Videos keep getting stuck at 144p, and restarting the app doesn’t help

YouTube / Pocket-lint

Users on Reddit have reported experiencing issues with the YouTube app on iOS for the past week. One user, whose video streams are stuck at 144p, tried restarting their phone, manually setting the auto-video quality to higher, and reinstalling the app to no avail.

“Every video I click on YouTube the quality automatically sets to 144p even if I try to manually change it higher, it just reverts back to 144p,” one user noted. Another user who is affected and pays for YouTube Premium feels let down. “This is beyond frustrating considering I’m paying an outrageous price for YT premium every month and they didn’t even try to help.”

What frustrates many users is that when they try to change to a higher video quality, the video stream just starts endlessly buffering, and restarting the app doesn’t help. There are several Reddit posts about this issue, some a few days old and others nearly a week old, so the problem has persisted for some time before YouTube intervened. YouTube states it is “actively looking into this,” so hopefully, a fix will be forthcoming soon. If you want to stay informed about this issue, YouTube has a support thread that it will update with new information once it is available.