YouTube said it has received complaints from users about poor video quality across its apps, web, and TV platforms. The company is investigating the cause of the poor video quality and will provide updates as soon as possible.

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YouTube is looking into an issue related to video display quality. Photo: Howtogeek

Initially, the majority of complaints came from iOS users, but have since spread to other platforms. Most users are only able to watch YouTube and YouTube Shorts videos at 144p or 360p resolution, resulting in severely blurry images on phones, computers, and 4K TVs. The issue is not related to the connection or device, but rather to YouTube's system.

Additionally, when users try to adjust the video settings to 480p, 720p, 1080p, or higher, the video may stutter or experience other errors. Some members on Reddit — the world’s largest discussion forum — said that even when they manually set the video quality, the YouTube app automatically reverts to 144p every time they reopen it.

The extent of the bug is unclear, but YouTube's support page has nearly 5,000 responses, suggesting many people are experiencing the same problem.

YouTube automatically adjusts video quality based on a variety of factors to provide the best viewing experience. Video quality may vary during playback depending on your Internet speed, screen size or video player, original video quality, and browser.