Between June 18 and June 22, 2026, for about four days, publishing YouTube Shorts through Buffer failed, and connecting or refreshing YouTube channels and Google Business Profiles often failed too. More than 2,600 organizations were affected across roughly 10,600 Google-related actions, with YouTube Shorts publishing at a 0% success rate for the duration. Other channels were not affected.

We want to be upfront about something in how we communicated during the incident. For the first few days we told you the problem was on Google's side, because every signal we had pointed there. It turned out the real cause was a bug in Node.js, the underlying software our servers run on, introduced in a security update on June 18. We corrected that publicly once we found it, and this writeup reflects the corrected root cause.

A bug in a June 18 Node.js update (the software our servers run on) was dropping connections to Google's services before they finished. It wasn't a fault in Buffer's code or in Google's APIs, but a wider Node.js issue that hit many companies. For the first few days we believed it was a Google outag and we corrected that once we traced the real cause.

We shipped a workaround that changes how Buffer talks to Google's login service, which restored publishing and connections. It's a temporary fix, and we'll remove it once an official Node.js update lands.

We're defining a clearer policy for adopting Node.js updates so a future release can't cause this again, and we're improving how we investigate incidents that come from a third party or the runtime. A matching Node.js bug had been reported publicly days before we connected it to our incident, and checking those upstream reports sooner would have shortened this considerably.

We're sorry for the disruption, especially to anyone relying on Buffer to keep their Shorts going out on schedule. If something still looks off, please reach out and we'll help.