YouTube RSS feed not working? Test it with curl, then plan for the outages
When every channel feed returns 404 at once, YouTube's feed is down, not your parser; here is how to tell, what the record looks like, and what to use instead.
By ClaudeGPT Si Newsroom, Editorial team
3 min read
If your YouTube RSS feed is not working and every channel returns 404 at the same time, the fault is almost certainly on YouTube's side, not in your parser. The feed endpoint has had recurring outages since December 2025, and on November 4, 2026 it failed again for channels that have posted for years. For code that has to know about new uploads, plan for the feed to disappear for days, or hand the job to AyeWatch's YouTube monitors, which take a channel link and can post to your webhook.
Test it before you touch your code
Request two feeds you know are valid. If both fail the same way, stop debugging your app.
curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}\n" \
"https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UC_x5XG1OV2P6uZZ5FSM9Ttw"
curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}\n" \
"https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCXuqSBlHAE6Xw-yeJA0Tunw"
Those are Google Developers and Linus Tech Tips. On a healthy day you get 200 and an XML body. During an outage you get 404 with a Google HTML error page instead. That is what we saw for both channels, for a playlist feed and for the user= form when we ran the check on November 4.
The endpoint itself still exists. The channel page for @GoogleDevelopers carries a link tag of type application/rss+xml pointing to that exact URL, so YouTube's own HTML still advertises it.
The outage record so far
| When | Who reported it | What they saw |
|---|---|---|
| December 2025 | FreeTube maintainers | Daily outages; subscriptions failing to load |
| December 2025 | n8n community users | 404s for part of the day, then recovery |
| February 2026 | ocaml.org | Platform-wide 404s on nine sources; issue closed September 30 once feeds returned 200 |
| October 27, 2026 | Obsidian RSS Dashboard user | Every YouTube feed 404, new feeds failing |
| November 4, 2026 | Our curl test | 404 on known-good channel and playlist feeds |
There has been no public statement from YouTube about the cause.
Rule out your own mistakes
A few real bugs look just like the outage, so check them once:
- Handle instead of ID. The parameter wants the UC channel ID. An @handle or custom URL slug will never resolve.
- Wrong parameter. Channels use channel_id; playlists use playlist_id with the list= value from the playlist link.
- Poll rate. FreeTube users fetching hundreds of channels suspected throttling, with partial success on retries. Spread requests out and back off on errors.
- Headers. An n8n helper suggested a browser User-Agent. Worth a try, but a header will not fix a 404 that every client sees.
Fallbacks and alternatives
- YouTube Data API v3. Needs a Google account, a registered app and an API key. The default quota is 10,000 units a day, and a typical list call costs 1 unit, so checking a few channels this way is cheap.
- WebSub push. Google documents push notifications through a PubSubHubbub hub for uploads and title or description edits. The topic URL uses the same videos.xml?channel_id= format, so the format is still part of Google's own docs. We did not test whether push kept working during the outages.
- AyeWatch. Paste youtube.com/@name or a /channel/UC link, pick Channel videos, Shorts, Live streams, Community posts or Search, and add an optional plain-English filter. On paid plans, from $9 a month, alerts can go to a webhook, Slack, Discord or email, and the AyeWatch API is available too. No YouTube API key, no feed parser.
Which fallback fits
If you need structured metadata such as video durations or older uploads, the Data API is the better tool and worth the quota bookkeeping. If you only need to react when a channel posts, a pushed alert from AyeWatch saves you from writing retry logic around an endpoint that keeps going dark.