MrBeast not to blame for YouTube dislike extension outage

Users have been pointing fingers at popular YouTuber MrBeast for the recent outage of the Return YouTube Dislike extension. However, Dmitry Selivanov, the developer of the extension, clarified to Dexerto that the issue was due to server problems, not related to any recent controversies involving MrBeast.

In 2021, YouTube removed the public dislike count from all videos, while creators still have access to these metrics. Extensions like Return YouTube Dislike, which has around 5 million users, emerged to fill this gap by allowing users to see dislikes. Recently, this extension stopped working, displaying a “temporarily unavailable” message.

Users on platforms such as the Chrome Web Store and Reddit speculated that the outage was connected to a controversy involving MrBeast, where he was accused of censoring comments and allegedly manipulating the like-to-dislike ratio on one of his videos. One user review on the Chrome Web Store stated, “This extension just happens to stop working precisely when MrB [MrBeast] decides to post a fake screenshot... Sorry, I don’t believe in coincidences.”

Another user remarked, “One day after people started talking about the dislikes on the [MrBeast] video the plugin stopped working… Hope the plugin will work soon.” Despite these claims, Selivanov explained that the problem was due to database replication consuming all available free space, leading to a service failure. He emphasized that this was not caused by any external influences but rather a server misconfiguration.

Additionally, Selivanov mentioned that the outage is unrelated to any actions by MrBeast, Google, or YouTube. Google is currently phasing out support for the Manifest V2 framework, affecting several older browser extensions, including the popular ad-blocker uBlock Origin.