Google deleted my YouTube account, and I don’t know what happens next

Originally published Jan 21, 2026, but it's important.

I was sitting at my desk around 5pm yesterday when one of my co-workers casually mentioned that they had noticed my Pixels for Breakfast YouTube account was missing. I thought they were messing with me, simply because they mentioned it so casually. I rushed over to the page and noticed it was gone. The embeds of all my interviews and video essays? Also gone. My head started to spin. What the hell happened here? 

Trying to contact Google support is a special hell. There literally is no way to start a chat or log a support ticket. They instead point you to their community forums where you can share your tales and people seem to more often than not, scold the person making said post, telling them that they more than likely violated some TOS and they should just start a new account. Not incredibly helpful. What is even more perplexing is that you need to log into your Google account to make these threads, something that I cannot do because apparently my Google account has been deleted. 

So I created a thread on my personal Google account that I only use for YouTube these days. It was flagged as not relevant because I was talking about a different account. Reading threads on Reddit and Mastodon, it seems that I am not the only one who has lost access to their content in the past six or so months. The prevailing theory is that there is some AI tool removing accounts based on content. I am not entirely sure I buy that, but perhaps because I had gameplay footage in my content, that was the culprit? 

I am incredibly pissed off, but mostly I am just sad. My account has been active for eight or so years, with over a hundred videos that have chronicled huge portions of my life. The first videos when I stopped being a full-time game journalist, and took my first steps into indie game development. Live streams for when I was Australia’s first Mixer partner. Milestone interviews for me personally with people like Greg Kasavin, Chet Faliszek, Xalavier Nelson Jr., and many others. Video essays that took weeks to put together, that actually were racking up views, content that I was proud of. 

All gone. Lost to the ether, and I don’t even know why.

So what’s next? Indie Dispatch I guess will spin up a dedicated channel on YouTube, and I will be investigating PeerTube as an alternative. I think after this I want to go Federated wherever possible, but the reality is I don’t think those interviews will get much traction on any service that is not YouTube. But the question will be will people I request interviews from even be interested now that we will be starting from scratch instead of leveraging the Pixels for Breakfast followers? 

But I can’t think about that now. I could sit her and shake my fist at the sky and just give up on this project. I definitely thought about it last night. But instead I am choosing to take this moment as permission to start again with a clean slate, try and do it somewhere alongside YouTube that I have more control over and promote that as the #1 platform to see this content, and hope I can rebuild a following around this new idea.