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YouTube glitch causes creators to lose thousands of subscribers in minutes

YouTube is working on a 'fix.'

 

Audra Schroeder

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Posted on Feb 9, 2017   Updated on May 25, 2021, 1:06 am CDT

This week, many YouTube channels saw their subscriber numbers mysteriously plummet in real time. 

The glitch was apparently discovered and livestreamed by BlackScreenTV earlier this week. Subscriber numbers for popular creators like PewDiePie, DramaAlert, and Tana Mongeau (who saw her own drama this week) decreased within minutes, and BlackScreenTV claimed he lost 10,000 subs in 10 seconds. H3H3 tweeted out proof as well. 

As subscribers dipped into negative numbers in some cases, it seemed this was a more than just a bug. #YouTubeGlitch circulated as many people grabbed their popcorn/freaked out. 

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YouTube finally addressed the issue and tweeted that it accidentally caused one unsubscribe to count as two, so unsubscribing and resubscribing over and over drops the count. 

This subscriber glitch has been an issue before, but not on this scale. YouTube claims that subs were not actually lost in the glitch. 

A YouTube rep told the Daily Dot the company is working on a fix.  

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*First Published: Feb 9, 2017, 11:56 am CST