How to fix the YouTube filter not working

In the past 12 months we’ve all experienced some of the giants in the industry’s services drop off:

• Oct 2018 – YouTube was down for a couple of hours
• March, 2019 – Facebook was down for a couple of days
• March, 2019 – YouTube’s filter function doesn’t work

What’s the filter function do?

The YouTube filter function allows you to search videos and filter them based on the following:

• The length of the video, e.g. longer than 20 minutes
• When the video was uploaded to YouTube, e.g in the past month
• The quality of the video, e.g. HD

This means you could search for all videos about ‘how to make the perfect cake’ that are short (less than 4 minutes), are in high definition and have been released in the past 12 months – i.e. they’re the latest.

Why did YouTube turn the filter off?

The official answer from Google is that the filter was turned off in response to the terrible events that happened in New Zealand a few days ago.

How do you fix it yourself?

If you really, really need to have the filtering option – do your searches from Google and use their filtering engine. It’s not as pretty as the YouTube search but it does the trick. Watch the video below to learn more about the broken YouTube filter and how to fix it.