YouTube bug causes some comments to disappear; reports surge for videos posted between April 4 and 5

It appears that a bug is occurring on some YouTube videos in which some comments that should normally be displayed are no longer shown.

In particular, there have been many reports involving videos posted around April 4 to April 5 (JST), with people saying that comments that were displayed without issue immediately after posting stopped appearing around April 6.

Details of the issue

According to a Japanese-language post submitted to the YouTube Help Community, a bug has occurred in which some comments simultaneously stopped being displayed on multiple videos posted between the evening of April 4 (JST) and the evening of April 5 (JST).

According to the poster, this issue began occurring on the morning of April 6, and before that the comments had been displayed normally.

There have also been similar reports in English-speaking regions. On Reddit's r/youtube, multiple reports were submitted saying that although the comment count shown on the video had not decreased, the comments actually displayed had been reduced to only the most recent few.

According to that thread, even after sorting comments by newest instead of top comments, fewer comments than should normally appear were still being shown, with people saying things such as there had been 40 comments, but by the next day only the latest 4 were displayed and 50 comments had become 4.

When I checked several videos posted during the relevant period, I found that the number of comments actually displayed was clearly smaller than the number shown as the comment count.

Based on these reports, this situation is difficult to explain solely by common cases such as the poster having deleted comments or the comments having been categorized as "Held for review" in YouTube Studio.

There has not yet been any official announcement from YouTube, so the exact cause is still unknown, but because the comment count is being maintained, it may be possible that the problem lies not in the loss of comment data but in the display or update process.

What can be done?

According to reports from users experiencing the issue, comments that had previously been visible stopped being displayed, so it is highly likely that the problem is on YouTube's side, and there are no effective countermeasures users can take themselves.

Just to be safe, I recommend switching the comment sort order from top comments to newest first and checking YouTube Studio for any comments being held for review, but based on reports from other users, there is little hope that this will resolve the issue.

If you are affected by this problem, it would be best to first wait a few days, and if it still is not resolved, try sending feedback to YouTube or mentioning @TeamYouTube.

When reporting the issue, including detailed issues, the time it occurred, and the URLs of the affected videos may help with identifying the cause.

Conclusion

It appears that a bug is occurring on some YouTube videos in which some comments that should normally be displayed are no longer shown.

This issue has been occurring on videos posted around April 4 to April 5, and the cause is currently unknown.