YouTube AI Summarizers Stopped Working: Here's Why (and How We Fixed It)

Something broke on June 9th.

If you use our AI summarizer, or any YouTube summarizer, really, you probably noticed. One day it worked. The next day it didn't.

Here's what happened: YouTube has been making a lot of changes to how we can access YouTube transcripts. Small changes at first. A tweak here, an adjustment there. Each time, we adapted. No big deal.

But June 9th, 2025 was different. This wasn't a minor adjustment. This broke a popular method that pretty much everyone used to fetch transcripts.

We weren't the only ones caught off guard. Every major summarizer extension was affected. The popular ones, the indie ones, the ones with millions of users. All of them. Same problem.

YouTube probably had their reasons. When you're building on someone else's land, you're always one update away from scrambling.

So we scrambled.

We dug into the changes, rewrote our transcript retrieval code, tested it, broke it, fixed it, tested it again. It's not glamorous work. It's the kind of thing users notice until it stops working.

The good news: We figured it out. We pushed a fix. Chrome approved it (faster than usual, thankfully). If you're reading this, the extension should be working again.

The bad news: This won't be the last time. When you build tools that depend on other platforms, you're signing up for this dance. They lead, you follow. Sometimes you step on each other's toes.

We're sorry you got caught in the middle. We know it's frustrating when tools you depend on suddenly stop working. We use our own extension every day, so we felt it too.

But here's our promise: When YouTube moves the goalposts, we'll move with them. It might take us a day or two, but we'll get there. Because at the end of the day, this tool exists to save you time. And that's worth fighting for.

Thanks for sticking with us.