Bug in Adblock (Plus) appears to be the cause of delays on YouTube, among others

A bug in ad blockers Adblock and Adblock Plus appears to be the cause of the delays at sites that have been widely complained about online in recent days. Many delays were mainly reported on the YouTube site, but this does not seem to be due to that platform.

A developer of Adblock and Adblock Plus, Marwan Zibaoui, states that the cause of the delays has been found. It appears to be a bug in version 3.22 of Adblock Plus and 5.17.0 of Adblock. Zibaoui says that a fix for the problems will be released ‘as soon as possible’.

Many users on Reddit and others thought that these delays occurred specifically on YouTube and were part of a deliberate action by the video platform. The site has previously stated that users with an ad blocker can expect a ‘suboptimal viewing experience’. For example, the video platform added code last year that made YouTube videos load more slowly for adblock users.

This time, however, YouTube seems to have nothing to do with it, discovered Ublock Origins developer Raymond Hill previously based it on Firefox’s profiler tool. This showed performance problems on various sites. Hill states that the delays are especially noticeable on websites that are dynamically updated. In addition to YouTube, this also applies to Yahoo, the developer writes.