I ran into this issue and wanted to make a quick note of it.

My YouTube iOS app wasn’t recording my Watch History, but the browser version was working. I tried all the usual troubleshooting steps of signing out, toggling the setting, delete the app, restarting my phone and nothing worked

I randomly had the idea to check my router’s firewall, I use PfSense and have this plugin called pfBlockerNG installed. I went to `firewall

pfBlockerNG > Reportsand there is was!-s.youtube.com` was being blocked. Adding that URL to the whitelist, I didn’t do a wildcard, and the iOS starting working again!

I’m not sure what happened as pfBlocker’s DNSBL has been enabled for a while and I had zero issues. My theory is: my Phone’s DNS cache expired, re-fetching tripped the DNS Blocker. This problem seems to happen to all DNS Blockers and is not pfBlocker specific.

This is a niche problem. I expect anybody using PfSense would be able to figure this out way faster than me. I’m making note of this and adding some specific keywords in hopes that this may potentially help somebody in the future.

Edit: markdownlint, textlint and meta TOML -> YAML