MrBeast isn’t to blame for YouTube’s dislike extension being broken

Anurag Singh
YouTube video with dislike option

Return YouTube Dislike, a browser extension that shows you how many people disliked a YouTube video has stopped working.

Users are blaming YouTuber MrBeast for the outage, but the extension’s developer has told Dexerto that’s not the case.

YouTube removed the public dislike count from all videos in 2021, though creators can still see them. There are various extensions that allow users to see dislikes on videos.

Return YouTube Dislike is one of the more popular ones, with 5 million users, but the extension is no longer working.

There are tons of users on the Chrome Web Store and Reddit saying the extension isn’t working anymore. Users are seeing a “temporarily unavailable” message when they try to use it to check dislikes.

A lot of people are linking this to the recent MrBeast video drama, where the YouTuber was “accused” of censoring comments and getting over a million dislikes.

“Well well well, this extension just happens to stop working precisely when MrB [MrBeast] decides to post a fake screenshot, and a controversy ensues concerning one of his video’s like/dislike ratio. Sorry, I don’t believe in coincidences. Not a fan of his, but I am a fan of this extension,” read one user review on Chrome web store.

“One day after people started talking about the dislikes on the [MrBeast] video the plugin stopped working… Hope the plugin will work soon,” read another. “[MrBeast] got [you] bro,” wrote one user.

We tried using the extension but couldn’t see the dislike count either. However, Dmitry Selivanov, the developer of the extension, has confirmed to Dexerto that it’s just a server issue.

Specifically, database replication consumed all available free space, leading to a failure in services.

Selivanov explained that the issue wasn’t caused by any recent events but was simply due to a misconfiguration.

So, neither MrBeast, Google, nor YouTube is responsible for the Return YouTube Dislike extension stopping working.

Google is instead cracking down on older browser extensions. The company is phasing out support for the Manifest V2 framework, which popular ad-blocker uBlock Origin relies on.