Hugely popular YouTuber Mark “Markiplier” Fischbach has determined the potential culprit of YouTube’s recent issues, which he believes are due to the ongoing shutdown of social network Google Plus.
According to Markiplier, Google Plus’s deep integration into (and subsequent removal from) YouTube’s website could be responsible for the service’s widely-reported bugs, including its global blackout on October 16.
“As they’re shutting down Google Plus, it is breaking more and more things inside YouTube,” he explained. “These things are still broken – and they’re getting worse.”
He claimed that he’d reached out to YouTube about its issues, to no avail: which he believed was because the site’s staff doesn’t know how to fix the problem.
“I think the reason is, they don’t know how to fix it,” he suggested. “I think that’s the main problem with YouTube right now. …Google Plus was so deeply integrated into YouTube that they have no idea how to separate it out at this point.”
Subscribe to our newsletter for the latest updates on Esports, Gaming and more.
He theorized that YouTube had pushed a change to the site’s code on the date of the blackout, which ultimately prompted the shutdown. Additionally, he thinks that YouTube staff might be trying to understand what caused this issue in the interim before pushing for another change.
Markiplier felt that YouTube’s issues wouldn’t be placed in such a bad light if they communicated with their community, stating that the site is ‘pretending nothing is wrong.’
Google Plus is being removed over a ten-month period due to an initially undisclosed security breach in the platform, which allegedly exposed users’ profile information.