[Weird iCloud Public Relay Bug] Safari YouTube videos not playing

[macduke]

I'm having an issue which suddenly cropped up today with Safari and YouTube. For some reason every video just has a little spinning graphic on top of a black screen when I try to play them. Troubleshooting steps I have taken:

• Checked to confirm that there were no content blockers enabled (I usually don't because I have YouTube Premium with no ads)
• Restarted Safari
• Cleared entire Safari cache and then restarted Safari
• Restarted my Mac
• Tried logged in and logged out, in combination with the above
• Checked for updates, there were none
• Searched on Google including the scary second page of results
• Searched on MacRumors, no luck, made this post

I could use another browser but I like Safari since it's fast and lightweight and doesn't track me. Safari is my primary browser. I only use Chrome for work (I work from home) as I'm logged into my work-related Google accounts there which aren't able to utilize my YouTube Premium subscription for no ads.

Is it possible they rolled out some kind of an update that broke something with Safari? Thought surely someone else would've posted by now since I first noticed it about 9 hours ago.

 

[Nermal]

Is it possible they rolled out some kind of an update that broke something with Safari? Thought surely someone else would've posted by now since I first noticed it about 9 hours ago.

It was working fine for me three hours ago, but I'm not in a position to re-test right now. Try it in a private window and see what happens.

 

[macduke]

It was working fine for me three hours ago, but I'm not in a position to re-test right now. Try it in a private window and see what happens.

Huh, I didn't try private because I had cleared the cache. I just tried private and after about 20 seconds it loaded an ad, but the ad didn't play, but I could see the first frame. And then I clicked on skip and it went back to spinning forever. Interesting that it did something different, though. Maybe the other videos I had tested logged out didn't have ads? IDK how many ads are on YouTube nowadays since I've been ad-free for years, but I can only imagine it has increased, lol.

 

[macduke]

IDK why I didn't think to check the console because I'm a web developer, lol. It's throwing a bunch of errors when trying to load the video stream "Failed to load resource: A server with the specified hostname could not be found." and some 404 response codes that, at a glance, appear to be components that are used to load the video into the page. I don't do much with video for my job, mainly just embedding existing YouTube or Vimeo videos, as we often recommend clients use those services for video hosting to improve SEO relating to page speed.

 

[Xaositek]

You're not the only one - I thought it was the Ventura Beta 4 update but it's definitely not!

 

[Xaositek]

Found that Safari couldn't open https://rr1---sn-jvhvjvooxju-jv0e.googlevideo.com (server may be irrelevant) but I did an nslookup for that domain in a terminal which worked. Then I could browse to that address and also watch YouTube videos...

 

[macduke]

You're not the only one - I thought it was the Ventura Beta 4 update but it's definitely not!

It was working fine for me three hours ago, but I'm not in a position to re-test right now. Try it in a private window and see what happens.

Ok this just got more weird. I figured I would load up Firefox and just use that browser for YouTube, but it's doing the same thing in Firefox? Does FireFox use webkit now or something? SO WEIRD!

The only browser this seems to work in is Chrome. Which is kinda sus.

 

[Nermal]

Hmm. Still working perfectly fine in Safari for me. Which OS version are you on?

 

[macduke]

Hmm. Still working perfectly fine in Safari for me. Which OS version are you on?

12.5, latest.

Could something be corrupted with a video decoder on my system? Cosmic rays with non-ECC RAM and all that? LOL. I think Safari generally prefers H.264/5 and Chrome likes VP8/9. FireFox seems to be fine with either from what I can tell. But I tried Vimeo and others and they seem to play fine so I'm inclined to say no unless they are using some weird edge case part of a codec that I don't even know about? Not a video expert. IDK what YouTube is doing, but it's bizarre since it's happening across two browsers.

 

[Nermal]

For what it's worth, I'm on 12.4, although I don't imagine that that's the issue. Stranger things have happened though, e.g. 12.3 broke a few Google services (fixed in 12.3.1).

 

[macduke]

For what it's worth, I'm on 12.4, although I don't imagine that that's the issue. Stranger things have happened though, e.g. 12.3 broke a few Google services (fixed in 12.3.1).

So I was just reviewing the work of one of my developers who embedded a YouTube video in the background of a website hero and noticed it was spinning and was like duh, YouTube. So I opened it in Chrome and it looked fine, as expected. BUT I went back to the task, clicked on the original video link in the task to make sure they put the proper video in and boom, without thinking that I was in Safari, it opens in YouTube and starts playing. Weird. So I go to my subs and click on a video and it plays fine. I go back to the site where it wasn't loading in the background and it's still busted after refreshing, closing the tab, and bringing up the site again.

At this point I am beyond confused. Then it gets weirder.

I switch over to FireFox, and without doing anything, the tab I had opened to YouTube with a video that wasn't playing, is loaded, and I click play and it starts instantly.

Some things in life are just a mystery.

 

[macduke]

Alright, this just got even stranger, and I didn't think that was possible.

So YouTube stopped working again when I went to settle in to finishing up some work for the week this evening. I switched over to my tab that was previously working, and the video was playing fine. BUT once it got a minute into the video, the buffer ran out and it stopped playing and did the spinning loop.

It popped up at the bottom with the "Experiencing interruptions?" prompt. I clicked the link, and it brought up these results, attached below, showing CloudFlare in Chicago.

I don't live in Chicago, but it's a few hundred miles away. So the closest huge city (aka NYC, LA, Houston) that is likely to have a big hub. Then I remembered, doesn't Apple use CloudFlare for iCloud Private Relay?

But here's the deal: I don't use iCloud Private Relay on my Mac because I need my IP address to stay static for something I do with my server at work. In fact, I had never used it. Until last weekend when I just wanted to toggle it on, test something, and toggle it back off. I don't use any other VPN.

So I checked my iCloud settings and sure enough, it was still turned off. So I tried the old turning it on and back off trick, and that didn't affect YouTube at all. I checked my IP address, and it's my normal IP address from my fiber provider. I know this because I had it written down previously for work-related reasons (not VPN, server firewall).

So I opened that client page again that had a YouTube video in the background of the hero in Chrome, hit refresh and it started playing. I quickly switched back over to Safari, and it was buffered back up, hit play and my video resumed playback like nothing had happened. BIZZARE.

This is the weirdest macOS issue I've had since the Finder wouldn't let me type the letter "F" into file names back in 2009 or 2010. No, it wasn't a hardware issue, the key worked fine otherwise, and nobody was able to help me fix it. I had to copy and paste the letter F into file names when I needed to use an F for like a year, 18 months until I got my new MBP.

F.

 

[bogdanw]

Try to disable Hide IP adrress from trackers https://support.apple.com/guide/safari/privacy-sfri35610/mac
Disable iCloud Private Relay https://support.apple.com/HT212614

 

[macduke]

Try to disable Hide IP adrress from trackers https://support.apple.com/guide/safari/privacy-sfri35610/mac
Disable iCloud Private Relay https://support.apple.com/HT212614

EDIT: I thought this fixed it as I was jumping around from video to video and testing watching videos and it was lasting way longer than before when I had to do the trick but in the time I wrote up a response to you thanking you for finally fixing this problem and doing a deep dive into why I thought so, it has stopped working again. It's so inconsistent, I hate this so much, lol.

 

[Yog]

I'm not sure if this is the same issue or not.... I use FireFox and had the same problem. I could not resolve it until I went to "settings" on the video and changed the "quality" to a higher setting (1080p or higher) and then everything started to work perfectly again.

Hope this helps.

 

[macduke]

So I never tried turning back on iCloud Private Relay which I had temporarily turned on my Mac for the first time this past week to test some stuff with my work and now YouTube is working fine.

The problem is an IP-based verification system that I use for work purposes (not a VPN) won't connect now. Just like I had discovered during my testing, which I think is what triggered this entire issue in the first place. I have had iCloud Private Relay turned on for my iPhone and iPad since it came out and it has been working fairly well, so I wanted to try it on my Mac and see how it worked. Turns out it broke YouTube, even after turning it off, and now it's just permanently broken until I can figure out why.

So at least I think the issue seems to be identified. And that's half the battle. Now I can focus my searches and hopefully get this sorted. I'm going to update the title and add an edit to the first post to hopefully draw more attention from people who have had issues with iCloud Private Relay.

 

[bogdanw]

Permanently disable iCloud Private Relay https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/permanently-disable-icloud-private-relay.2332146/

 

[macduke]

Permanently disable iCloud Private Relay https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/permanently-disable-icloud-private-relay.2332146/

Thanks for the help, but unfortunately this didn't work either. I can confirm the setting is disabled. Even went as far as a full reboot and a private browsing window to check YouTube but YouTube only works when I'm on iCloud Private Relay now. This is the strangest bug and it's driving me crazy. I even downloaded and tried the purple Safari test preview app or whatever it's called with no luck.

 

[7asic]

For what it's worth, I've got the exact same symptoms. I don't know what is going on; I didn't change anything with private relay. Just seemed to stop working one day.

 

[macduke]

For what it's worth, I've got the exact same symptoms. I don't know what is going on; I didn't change anything with private relay. Just seemed to stop working one day.

One day last Wednesday??

 

[bogdanw]

Try to change the DNS servers to Google’s 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4
Apple - Specify a DNS server on Mac https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/specify-a-dns-server-on-mac-mchlp2720/11.0/mac/11.0
Google Public DNS https://developers.google.com/speed/public-dns/
From Terminal:

networksetup -setdnsservers Ethernet 8.8.8.8 8.8.4.4

if you use an Ethernet connection

networksetup -setdnsservers Wi-Fi 8.8.8.8 8.8.4.4

for Wi-Fi
and for both

dscacheutil -flushcache

to clear the DNS cache.
Test on https://www.dnsleaktest.com/ to see if Safari uses the Google DNS servers or still the Private Relay ones (they were/are from Cloudflare).

 

[7asic]

The issue ended up being on my ISP's side and resolved after a few days. FYI.