Issue with Connecting YouTube Channels

Between October 7 and October 9, some customers couldn’t connect new YouTube channels to Buffer or refresh the ones they already had connected. Some attempts worked and others failed. We’re sorry for the frustration this caused.

Root cause
YouTube’s systems became unstable and began rejecting valid sign-ins from third-party apps. This made YouTube wrongly report that accounts lacked permission, or even that they were suspended. Other social media tools that connect to YouTube saw the same problem. Nothing on Buffer’s side changed to cause it.

Customer impact
The first failures appeared on October 7, and they continued on and off until about 12:44 UTC on October 9. In that time, a few hundred YouTube connection attempts failed. Some of those were the same customers retrying, so fewer customers were affected than that number suggests. Most failures stopped around 21:00 UTC on October 8. Other channels weren’t affected.

Steps to resolution
After the first reports came in, we confirmed the errors were coming from YouTube and that no recent Buffer changes were involved. We kept our status page updated and watched the errors until YouTube’s systems recovered. The incident was closed once failures had stayed very low for several hours.