YouTube has confirmed that the glitch which saw some creators experiencing subscriber count losses has been fixed.
First reported by YouTuber BlackScreenTV on 8 February, the glitch saw a handful of creators experiencing a noticeably large drop in subscribers, with some ending up with a negative subscriber count displayed on their homepage.
Sharing his theory, Alex theorised the bug was caused by a counting error, which saw YouTube failing to balance out the numbers after someone subscribed and then unsubscribed, resulting in a net gain of minus one instead of zero. This theory was later confirmed by Social Blade.
Not long after the issue was brought to their attention, YouTube acknowledged via Twitter that they were working to fix the issue and assured creators that subscription data had not been lost:
Yikes! Starting Monday, in some cases, we accidentally started counting two unsubs for the price of one. We’re working on a fix!
— Team YouTube (@TeamYouTube) February 8, 2017
@stacysays No actual subs are/were lost, it's just the count that is incorrect. We're working on fixing it, so it shows the correct number.
— Team YouTube (@TeamYouTube) February 9, 2017
Word of the glitch spread not long after Alex brought it to light, resulting in many from the YouTube community taking to Twitter to share their frustrations, including Olajide ‘KSI’ Olatunji, Tom Cassell, and Felix Kjellberg:
You can't lose subs if you delete your channel… pic.twitter.com/AMb40uDWwf
— KSI (@KSIOlajidebt) February 8, 2017
Y u do this 🤣
I hit 10M subs!
You guys purge 115k inactive channels
I'm close to 10M again!
Crazy unsub glitch happens!
🙃— Thomas 👁〰👁 (@ProSyndicate) February 8, 2017
https://t.co/WuYL5nom4h
calling out @YouTube @YouTubeGaming @YTCreators @TeamYouTube— pewdiepie (@pewdiepie) February 9, 2017
On 9 February, YouTube took to Twitter to apologise and announce that the glitch had been fixed and subscriber counts had been returned to normal:
Sub counts are now fixed! We incorrectly showed a decrease of 2 instead of 1. No additional ppl were actually unsubbed. Sorry everyone! https://t.co/2v0XcsijMN
— Team YouTube (@TeamYouTube) February 9, 2017
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