What broke YouTube?
In September, if a student tried to access a video on YouTube, they were not able to watch it.
“I thought it was an administrative decision because there have been problems in class with students watching YouTube, but a lot of teachers use YouTube videos to help with their class materials. All my friends were saying that YouTube got blocked so that’s what I thought happened,” Sam Kaempf ’26 said.
Like Sam, a lot of students jumped to conclusions about why the YouTube app wasn’t working. Students were saying it was an administrative decision to try to get students to get off of their iPads and pay attention in class.
Mr. Wallace, Jesuit’s IT director, explained how this situation started.
“Google was intermittently blocking YouTube traffic from our iPad filtering vendor, Securly. This practice is common among many vendors (including Google, Microsoft, and Cloudflare) to protect their environments from suspected malicious traffic. However, in this instance, legitimate traffic was incorrectly blocked as well.”
Through Securly, there are filters that block inappropriate content for students along with the restriction of not allowing students to comment under videos or monetize videos that they are making. This is where there is speculation that in doing this, the app stopped working due to some of the filters messing with the system.
Securly has to filter certain material on YouTube as well as preventing any commenting or monetization on jesuitmail.org accounts. There has been some speculation that when they were doing this, something caused the app to crash and not work for the first half of the year.
Securly stated “We previously informed you about a YouTube functionality issue caused by a Google graylisting of proxy IPs”.
Because of this, YouTube wasn’t working for the first semester of the school year which caused some students to be unhappy because their teachers gave them YouTube videos that they couldn’t get access to on their iPads.
It was also a lengthy process to get the app back up.
“It started to intermittently block our web filter securely,” Wallace said. “Securly’s leadership team collaborated with Google to implement the necessary changes to their platform. The YouTube issue was resolved almost immediately after the fixes were deployed by Google. Jesuit IT staff remained in frequent communication with Securly to monitor the status of the fix. The YouTube issue affected only iPads across all of Securly’s customers. Securly currently provides internet filtering for approximately 20,000 schools.”
Securly released a statement saying that the problem had been resolved.
“We are pleased to report that Google has made changes that resolve this issue. Our testing confirmed the changes made seem to have resolved the issue we were seeing. YouTube videos are now playing on our test accounts”.
