Youtube Watching Broken Entire Home Network

halofive · February 12

I have a very standard home network setup. Xfinity service. User owned modem and router.

Recently I've been losing access to watch Youtube for short periods (days) of time. The kids are thrilled. End of last week same thing happened, however this time things don't seem to be resolving themselves. I did have a pihole on my network. It wasn't blocking Youtube adds and I wasn't expecting it to. However when Youtube was no longer accessible, first thing I tried was removing it from the network. Same result. Videos would buffer and then fail. I'm normally a FF user, so I switched to Chrome that I never use and doesn't have extensions on it etc. Same thing, Youtube fails tells me to retry. Tried removing Youtube app from my phone and putting it back, did not work.

This happens on all PCs on the network as well as my iPhones and iPads. Youtube app works fine when using cellular data (off network). Seems to have affected devices that were connected to the pihole for a while. Seems like possibly a caching issue. I've power cycled my modem and router a few times now.

I dusted off my work laptop that hasn't been on my home network for a really long time and Youtube is working as expected on my home network.

Falcon1986 · February 12

1 hour ago, halofive said:

I have a very standard home network setup. Xfinity service. User owned modem and router.

Recently I've been losing access to watch Youtube for short periods (days) of time. The kids are thrilled. End of last week same thing happened, however this time things don't seem to be resolving themselves. I did have a pihole on my network. It wasn't blocking Youtube adds and I wasn't expecting it to. However when Youtube was no longer accessible, first thing I tried was removing it from the network. Same result. Videos would buffer and then fail. I'm normally a FF user, so I switched to Chrome that I never use and doesn't have extensions on it etc. Same thing, Youtube fails tells me to retry. Tried removing Youtube app from my phone and putting it back, did not work.

This happens on all PCs on the network as well as my iPhones and iPads. Youtube app works fine when using cellular data (off network). Seems to have affected devices that were connected to the pihole for a while. Seems like possibly a caching issue. I've power cycled my modem and router a few times now.

I dusted off my work laptop that hasn't been on my home network for a really long time and Youtube is working as expected on my home network.

How did you configure your network to use the PiHole when it was connected? Are you sure your router isn't still using the PiHole's IP as the DNS address?

Also, on each device with the problem, "forget" the network and rejoin.

halofive · February 13

Thanks for jumping in @Falcon1986. I don't recall doing much in the way of config with the pihole itself when I first set it up. So it's pretty bog standard in that regard. I did change it from using Cloudflare (1.1.1.1) to Google (8.8.8.8) for DNS prior to removing it from the network. It was updated prior to removing it also.

Config to use pihole was just updating my router to use the static IP I had setup for pi that it was running on.

I've attached screen shots of the only places I've been able to find DNS setup on my Synology router. I'll try looking again. After confirming that I had moved the DNS (in the two screenshots below) just to double check I attempted forgetting and rejoining the local network and same broken behavior.

When first removing the pihole, lost access to internet sites (all of them) because I was setup to use the pihole still. So making the changes in the attached screenshots got me back to internet working, but broken Youtube. Back to where I was before.