youtube going offline

[oriagranat9]

Hey folks,

I have an OPNsense router that has lately been causing me a lot of trouble. Whenever I'm browsing YouTube trying to watch videos, it takes a really long time to load and even pops up a "YouTube is offline" message.
I have diagnosed that the issue is coming from the network, as it happens to all devices (Wi-Fi and LAN). When using a cellular network on my phone or a hotspot, this doesn't happen.
My current setup is: ISP (FTTH) -> Router (SFP port - PPPoE) -> Main switch -> LAN + Wi-Fi.
I'm using Unbound on both Cloudflare and Google DNS, and Dnsmasq for DHCP. There are no VLAN definitions or anything configured to block traffic on the main LAN network.
I would really appreciate the help!

[OPNenthu]

YT is known to be hostile toward ad blockers and certain browsers (e.g. Firefox).  I had this problem even with my old Asus router so I'm not convinced that it's a network issue on the client side, but I'm happy to be wrong about this.

The platform wants you to be friendly to their revenue stream so ideally you are using Chrome and you are not filtering ads.  Personally that's not my cuppa tea for browsing, so I just deal with the YT service disruptions and occasional loading delays.

Some things to check/try:

Is your Unbound set up with DNSBLs?  Do you see the same issue with Chrome manually set to 8.8.8.8 in DNS settings (and not redirected by OPNsense)? 

[oriagranat9]

i dont have any blocklist setup currently, this occurs on multiple devices (chrome, youtube app etc)

[OPNenthu]

I've read some threads on here (don't have the links handy) about people having connectivity issues with Microsoft sites/services that are worked around with MSS clamping.  I wonder if YT might also be impacted by some kind of MTU issue.

The other thing I can think of that might be contributing is this: https://github.com/opnsense/src/issues/254

Are you using IPv6?  Have you tried over IPv4?

This is anecdotal, but I recently changed my configuration to use NPTv6 which has the side effect that my outbound traffic is now preferring IPv4.  Since then, I do see a decrease in the instances of YT freezing or giving me connection error popups.  Maybe a nothingburger; maybe not.

[oriagranat9]

my isp only supports ipv4, ill try setting the mtu manually and see if there are any improvements.

[Nullman]

Like previous user said, youtube is known to be very hostile toward users that watch youtube from "unsupported" browsers and users that are not logged into either free or premium account. Their goal is data collection. As soon as they detect any obstacle that prevents them doing that, they start throttling the traffic and switching your videos to 144p or simply buffering indefinitely. To make your troubleshooting even harder, they do this for a few weeks and then stop. And then you think you resolved the issue just so it can all start over again in a week or two. You having no issues on your phone, pretty much confirms this. It doesnt happen to me any more on firefox, but then it does, i delete all youtube cookies and use user agent switcher to spoof both my os and browser type to something different. For example, Chrome on Windows 10. And guess what, you toube starts working without issues until AI on their end figures you out. And when it does, you just clear your cookies and switch again. I also dont think this issue has anything to do with your network or firewall.

[oriagranat9]

im having trouble on all devices, but when switching to a different network (5g hotspot for example)
so when my phone and pc is on wifi youtube dosent work, when they are on 5g it does work

[OPNenthu]

If it's not working at all, even with the YT app, then something could be blocking.  Only the logs can tell.

Earlier you said it worked but took long to load.  Different issue, IMO.

How's your other internet traffic?

[nero355]

my isp only supports ipv4

What's your WAN IP at the moment : A real IPv4 Address or a CG-NAT one ?

A lot of online services start tripping out when they see huge amounts of traffic coming from the same IP address and if you are logged in to one of those you will also see verification stuff starting to pop-up all the time !!


YouTube and all other Google stuff can be seriously annoying in general so maybe you shouldn't worry about it too much to be honest... :)

[oriagranat9]

its a real ipv4, all other traffic works ok no real problems.
i set the MTU to be 1500 and up until now everything is working now. ill update again in a few hours to make sure that this was really the problem

[Nullman]

its a real ipv4, all other traffic works ok no real problems.
i set the MTU to be 1500 and up until now everything is working now. ill update again in a few hours to make sure that this was really the problem

If the issue is still there, try using this privacy front end for youtube https://inv.nadeko.net/ and let us know if it works.