I almost completely lost our Youtube channel.
If you'd had told me 5 years ago that one day when someone would ask me "what do you do?" I would answer "I'm a Youtuber", I would have laughed.
But 3 years after I started to make videos for our friends and family, our little Youtube channel grew to become my favorite place on the internet, the platform where we make most of our friends these days, as well as my full-time job and livelihood.
3 days ago, I almost completely lost all of it.
It started 3 weeks ago when I noticed that my phone wouldn't type the letter "t". My iPhone is almost 3 years old, the battery was starting to get lazy, and I knew that I would need to get a new one come winter of 2021.
Not being able to type "t" was a bit annoying but not the end of the world. After a few days though, the situation started to degrade. Now multiple keys would not work, and the auto-correct starting to behave a bit erratically.
It was mostly funny for the people I interact with through a chat (you know who you are ;)) but was starting to lose my patience with it.
We were a couple of weeks away from spending almost a month at sea, and my phone is where I get weather information, satellite emails, satellite phone, podcasts, audiobooks, etc…
I didn't want to be annoyed with a broken phone while in the middle of the ocean, so I decided that my phone was due for an early replacement.
Paying the money pained me a lot, but we had crew coming a couple of weeks later so the timing was great. I was able to order a new iPhone to her house in the US, right on time for her to throw it in her bag before joining us.
In the meantime, my phone started to act more and more strange. Swiping would be really hard and the keyboard would turn completely erratic, like if an invisible hand was frantically typing or holding various spots on the touchscreen.
I would try to open an app, and a completely different one would turn up. I couldn't type the password to get in my phone. I would try to write, and the touchscreen would "type" dozens of letters that made no sense.
But more weirdly, my phone would start to randomly open apps, type random letters, record stuff, almost going to the point of posting content or messages without me touching it. It wasn't too frequent and between erratic episodes, I could still use my phone.
One night, I was watching Youtube and the touchscreen had another crazy phase. This time, it almost made me go live on several occasions. I closed the screen, restarted it (which seemed to do the trick) and I didn't pay too much attention to it until…
The next day, I noticed that I was blocked out of the creator studio, which is the admin interface of our Youtube channel.
I did not understand what was going on, until I received an email from Youtube letting me know that my channel had been terminated.
My heart immediately sank straight into my stomach and in panic, I logged onto our channel's Google account, where I found out that THANKS GOD, it was "only" my personal channel that had been deleted.
I was absolutely gobsmacked, gutted and above all, completely confused.
I couldn't understand what happened. My private channel doesn't even have any public video or any subscribers. I used that account solely to keep my feed separate from our main channel, and to comment under my real name.
Youtube grants one appeal, and I immediately filed, citing how I didn't recognize any of the reasons why they would delete my account, which Youtube described as "Spam, fraud and commercially misleading content that aren't allowed on Youtube".
The next day, Youtube reviewed my appeal and maintained the permanent termination of my account.
A couple of days later, and my phone was so erratic that I couldn't use it anymore, and I pieced it together. The night that my phone acted erratically while watching Youtube, Youtube believed that my phone was a bot.
THANK GOD I was logged in with my private account. Had I been watching Youtube from our channel's account, it would be gone now.
I have spent the last 3 years pouring my heart and soul into "Ryan and Sophie Sailing", which has always been much, much more than just videos.
I have all the content of our channel saved on external hard drives of course, but there is no backup for 3 years of interactions with the community, thousands and thousands of conversations in the comment section, and the dozens of friendships that started there.
I will be trying to get in touch with someone at Youtube, but I havec very little hope that I'll ever see my private account back (although I really wish I could!)
If you know someone, please contact me! 🙂
In the meantime, I have retired my phone and will be getting my new one when our crew arrives tomorrow.
Fellow creators, make sure to protect your channel when you use Youtube on a mobile phone! I never ever imagined that this could happen, and I am hoping that this story helps someone think through a back-up plan or a way to safeguard their channel against... well. breaking phone.