I am seeing crazy theories blaming the decline in views at YouTube on algorithm changes. It seems that some creators are disproportionately affected as viewers drop off at ad breaks or abandon videos that fail to load.
My former client QVC is on its way to bankruptcy according to major news outlets. The company pinned its hopes on a resurgence in U.S. TV viewership that never came.
I see a hidden message in the Yes album title Aurora, which begins and ends with A like an Asia album title. Yes is no longer avoiding its musical connections to Asia. 4 of 5 Yes members have been members of Asia.
Now that I’ve submitted tax forms and payments on 7 web sites and put forms in the mail to 3 different IRS offices (I predict IRS 2031 will have a web site too), what else is there in life? #taxseason
Shout out to anyone else using
the relative quiet of the upcoming weekend to do tax filings.
YouTube error message
Honestly, it’s just embarrassing to be YouTube right now.
If it’s true that SpaceX now owns the former Twitter, maybe the company should be renamed MySpaceX.
My TikTok feed rn shows 9 live streams at once, including 2 originating in other countries. In the end it took TT US only a week to get through its chaotic tech transition and get creators back on board.
My guess is that databases are being moved between locations so that essential data is temporarily missing, at different times depending on the viewer’s location.
I saw TikTok back online as of 9 a.m. ET, and other reports suggest outages peaked around 5 a.m. All of that points to a server migration that was larger than usual and didn’t go exactly to plan.
TikTok U.S. appears to be offline. I assume installations, migrations, and purges are underway, as is typical for a Sunday morning, but connections between servers might also be hindered by the storm currently affecting half of the United States.
Good news on the YouTube front: engineers have worked out how to go to commercial (it sometimes works) when the video temporarily can’t be found in the database. (At least this gets rid of the blank screen!)
The algorithm on TikTok has been pretty well broken for five days. For anyone who hasn’t heard, the same quality of content can be found at @skylight.social, without the risks.
The TikTok sale apparently closed within the last hour, with new TOS that warns that TikTok U.S. viewers will now see an increased advertising load on unspecified other platforms. That would seem to confirm past reports of a data-sharing deal between TikTok and Meta.
The current sunny freeze weather pattern across much of North America can create an icicle hazard. These icicles formed just this morning. Imagine how much they might weigh after 3 days.
YouTube Studio dashboard when the YouTube database is offline
When you try to load YouTube Studio and the database is offline
I’ve been using iOS’s OCR all along, and it is getting more accurate year by year in distinguishing similar glyphs, separating from background, and reading my handwriting.
A bug in iOS 26.2 and macOS 26.2 disabled #AirDrop when I updated. The workaround was to turn AirDrop off in Finder and Control Center, then turn it on again.
These major system changes often take place with installations starting at 12 a.m. Sunday in California because that is the slowest time in the global Internet.
If you think you’re seeing a new look at YouTube today, it’s not your imagination. YouTube appears to have rolled out a new advertising regime overnight.
The feeling on the current X is not at all like the ghost town that Myspace turned into in its final months. X is more post-apocalyptic, with lots of interesting relics from the distant past, but basically everything has been destroyed.
There is no content on X. The most important features from Twitter are removed. No more DMs or groups. In my feed there was only one post from the hundreds of accounts I follow. It was The Beatles, just saying that the Beatles can now be found on Snap.
It forced me to change my password, then asked me why I had requested a password change. Things did not get better once I was in. I would click a button for one action and it took me to a page for a completely different action because of something like a server overflow error.
First it was hard to sign in. My first login attempt because a server crashed. The second attempt required 10 minutes of verifications because the platform flagged my failed first login attempt as suspicious activity.
A dream reminded me to log in to X so my account doesn’t get deleted for inactivity. So I did. The bottom line: X almost doesn’t exist anymore.
The latest TikTok update promises to have corrected the random browsing crashes that have crippled the For You Page for months, but I am skeptical enough that I am not going to be the one to test it.
Be the presence that you were searching for online.
I am told that the TikTok algorithm is currently being rebuilt entirely within the U.S. to comply with the TikTok ban. U.S. users have reason to be suspicious — suddenly Big Brother is watching. I find that I am already limiting my interactions.
Live streaming on TikTok is broken at the moment. The app plays repeating audio segments from hours ago but can’t find video and can’t open new live streams. Coming on a Sunday on the heels of other rumors about TikTok’s future, could this be the first stage of the shutdown?
Problems with content retrieval at YouTube are getting worse. The worst database problems are with day-of-release videos and ones more than a month old. Errors can prevent start of playback or return from midroll ad break.