One of my community members happened to mention in my chat room just a little while ago that it seemed odd that we lost over nine thousand subscribers on our YouTube channel within the past hour. I immediately knew something wasn’t right. Yes, I lose subscribers at times. Heck, even after uploading the worst video ever created I only lost about twenty subscribers. There’s no way that it is “normal” to lose about 9500 of them in less than an hour.

After a quick search online, I learned that this is an ongoing exploit that YouTube claims to have now fixed.

The attack, apparently, is due to a Javascript exploit that is being perpetrated by a number of YouTube users. By copy/pasting a segment of code hosted on Pastebin, YouTube users are able to dramatically decrease the subscriber counts of YouTube’s notorious, if not famous, users.

I suppose I am supposed to feel honored a bit by that statement, since our channel was attacked. However, people such as the infamous Fred and Shane Dawson lost more than 100,000 subscribers. I am happy to report we lost less than ten thousand.

Even though YouTube has said it will restore the subscriptions, you should keep an eye on your account. If you feel that someone is missing, go back and re-subscribe to them. It won’t hurt anything… and you don’t want to miss out on some of the cool content these people are putting out.