Starting in early February 2022, some Applets using YouTube URLs render a broken link when posted to Facebook, Reddit, and more.
The link looks something like https://www.youtube.com/supported_browsers?next_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DdQw4w9WgXcQ, and takes users to the below Your browser is up to date page instead of the YouTube video:
As a result, previews on certain third-party sites were broken:
We found that YouTube URLs in either of the following formats experience the above behavior:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ
https://youtu.be/dQw4w9WgXcQ
While URLs in the below format work as expected:
https://www.youtube.com/watch/dQw4w9WgXcQ
So we've added a new AlternativeUrl ingredient to all YouTube triggers that automatically modifies the format of the URL provided by YouTube to match the working format.
Switch over to the AlternativeUrl ingredient in your YouTube Applets, and they should start behaving normally again.
Will IFTTT be updating all existing URL ingredients to the new format?
Currently, we have no plans to update existing Applets to use the new AlternativeUrl ingredient, or to update existing ingredients to use the new format.
This issue only affects Applets where the service tries to generate a preview from the video URL IFTTT sends. If we were to update all existing URL ingredients, this would affect all Applets using the URL ingredient and could potentially break a large number of Applets that are still working as expected.