anyone else lost YouTube sidebar?

no YouTube lefthand sidebar, showing only a blank white strip, tried clearing cache/cookies and restarting, logging out but even that’s only showing a white sidebar with the whirling loading icon of hope. not zoomed in etc.

safari 16.2/iMac YouTube premium.

I think something has changed at YT’s end as of last night. I’ve never seen an advert on the desktop site, now I’m seeing stalled videos where it’s trying to load ads and falling foul of my security settings. Refreshing and/or pressing play/pause/play seems to kickstart it back into life. Of all the suite of browsers I have installed, Firefox seems the least badly affected.

Cheers for reply cougar, perhaps its a botched update but kinda annoying as I cannot access subscriptions/history etc – I’ll check on it later

I mean, I can’t comment on Safari as I don’t have anything fruit-based in the house. Rather, it would be something of a coincidence if it were unrelated.

There’s been rumblings for a little while now that YT was going to crack down on ad blockers, I don’t explicitly block ads on YT so much as it’s been a side-effect from when I spent an afternoon locking down Chrome several years ago. I couldn’t tell you today what I did back then. I use Chrome as my primary browser (on desktop, I’m playing with Brave on a laptop) but also have Firefox and Edge installed for when I’m hoist by my own petard and it’s simpler just to hop across to a different browser than try to unpick settings.

been on chat with YouTube and took screenshot of blank sidebars and submitted to YouTube engineers so we’ll see if I get a reply.

I pay for YouTube premium so no ad blockers or use extensions of any kind in safari.