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Video scraper: YouTube RSS feeds returning 404 (platform-wide outage) #3512

@cuihtlauac

Description

@cuihtlauac

Summary

The video scraper logs [WARN] for 9 YouTube sources that consistently return 404. Investigation shows this is a platform-wide YouTube RSS feed outage, not stale playlist/channel IDs.

Affected sources

Source URL
Jane Street - Signal & Threads playlist_id=PLCiAikFFaMJouorRXDSfS2UoKV4BfKyQm
Jane Street - OCaml Unboxed playlist_id=PLCiAikFFaMJrgFrWRKn0-1EI3gVZLQJtJ
Jane Street - Tech Talks playlist_id=PLCiAikFFaMJoWyXnJ2BWpse5HuiYibNYs
Emelle TV channel_id=UCvVVfCa7-nzSuCdMKXnNJNQ
FUN OCaml channel_id=UC3TI-fmhJ_g3_n9fHaXGZKA
OCaml Programming (Clarkson) playlist_id=PLre5AT9JnKShBOPeuiD9b-I4XROIJhkIU
Collège de France - Sciences du logiciel playlist_id=PLtimy8tnozICbD45yhB7Ha_zIBJTIK3im
The Vimeagen channel_id=UCVk4b-svNJoeytrrlOixebQ
OCAML Workshop at ICFP 2023 playlist_id=PLyrlk8Xaylp7Tq5-ZN6jkir-sYrhGi_0E

Evidence that this is a YouTube-side issue

  • The 404s are persistent across the last 5 daily scrape runs (Feb 13–17, 2026).
  • Channel IDs were verified to still be valid (e.g. FUN OCaml, TheVimeagen, Jane Street all resolve via youtube.com/@handle).
  • Even unrelated, known-good channels (Google, Computerphile) return 404 on the RSS endpoint right now.
  • This matches a widely reported YouTube RSS outage: Google AI Developers Forum, FreeTube#8443, RSS-Bridge#2113.

Impact

None on the scraper — errors are caught and logged as [WARN], and the scrape completes successfully. No new videos from these sources are picked up while the outage persists.

Action

No code change needed for now. This issue tracks the upstream problem. Once YouTube restores the RSS feed endpoint, the scraper should resume working without changes.

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