Latest YouTube glitch skips ahead in videos after ads

Even with its recent price hikes, YouTube Premium is still one of the best values in streaming around — but Google’s just never going to convert everybody into a paying customer. The rest of us have to sit through the occasional ad, and in theory, that shouldn’t be a big deal. But YouTube ads also have a bad reputation for some bizarre, glitchy behavior, and now a new one is teleporting viewers into the middle of clips.

Ads on YouTube aren’t supposed to be particularly onerous, and most of the time we can just click through to our content after watching a short clip. And while sometimes we do have to endure a longer one, thankfully the unskippable 90-second ads some users reported turned out to be a glitch.

Our latest incident, however, concerns what happens after you skip those ads. Once you’re done with your pre-roll ads, either by skipping or watching to their conclusion, YouTube is supposed to take you right to the beginning of your content. But rather than doing that, some users are being bumped forward into the video already in progress, reports PiunikaWeb.

Just how far ahead in the video YouTube throws you seems to vary for affected users, with Omega636 on Reddit mentioning getting sent between 10 and 50 seconds into the clip. Over on Google’s own community forums, user 4572492730870474498 saw their video starting 40 seconds in after skipping ads.

What these users are seeing is almost certainly a bug, but based on the number of “me too” comments attached to these reports, it sounds like one that could be reasonably widespread.

Considering how on-edge YouTube ads already seem to make viewers — and that’s when they’re working properly — hopefully Google’s able to sort this glitch out soon.