On my list of "most annoying things in the world," videos that autoplay upon visiting a website come in at a solid third place. And here lately, it's been an ongoing battle for me and a lot of other users, because YouTube seemingly forsook us and started autoplaying videos all over the web.

Well, that's what we thought, anyway.

Turns out it's not exactly a YouTube issue – it's the Chromecast Chrome extension. If you have it installed, I bet you're seeing the same [annoying] problem. The issue has already been reported to Google and marked as critical, so hopefully a fix is underway. In the meantime though, there's a quick fix:

  • Remove the Chromecast extension from your browser
  • Restart the computer (restarting just Chrome doesn't seem to work)
  • Done

Now, go on about your merry way and enjoy life without autoplaying videos all up in your face. We'll let you know when Google issues a fix.

Update: As of the most recent comment on the bug tracker, it looks like it actually is a YouTube issue. A fix is scheduled to roll out today.

The YouTube team confirmed that there was a bad push yesterday which caused this issue to be triggered. There is a fix being qualified and that is scheduled to be pushed today that will correct this issue.

Closing this issue for now, since there's not a Chrome issue here in any event. Thanks to everyone for reporting this issue.