YouTube on my 6th gen iPad keeps getting stuck at 1 minute mark with “Something went wrong, restart and try again later

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I'm losing my entire mind over this specific YouTube bug on my 6th gen iPad, I have sunk hours into troubleshooting and none of the standard fixes work at all.

It does not randomly freeze mid-playback or hit infinite spinning buffers. Every single video I play will run perfectly fine exactly up to the 1 minute timestamp, then it hard cuts out. The error pop-up that shows up says "Something went wrong, restart and try again later". No matter how many times I refresh, skip the video, close and reopen the app, it will still cut off right at that exact 1 minute mark every single time.

I have already blown through every single basic troubleshooting suggestion every guide has ever listed:

✅ Force closed, restarted, fully killed the YouTube app dozens of times

✅ Done the full hard reset for this Home-button iPad, holding top + home till the Apple logo shows up

✅ Cleared all YouTube watch history, search history, and wiped every cached data I could find in the app settings

✅ Uninstalled, redownloaded and reinstalled YouTube 3 separate times

✅ Tested YouTube in Safari — oddly enough the browser version doesn't hit this exact 1 minute cutoff, but it stutters constantly and the experience is garbage compared to the native app

✅ Updated my 6th gen iPad to the maximum supported latest iPadOS version available

✅ Checked local storage, I have over 110GB of free space so that's not the issue at all

✅ Swiped every single background app shut to free up its limited 2GB RAM completely

✅ Full reset of my network settings, reconnected to Wi-Fi

✅ Disabled every single ad blocker, content blocker and VPN that could possibly interfere with stream loading

✅ Switched my Wi-Fi DNS to Google public DNS 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4

✅ Locked YouTube playback quality all the way down to 360p to eliminate heavy high-bitrate stream issues.

I know 6th gen iPads are old and under-spec these days, but this worked flawlessly 3 weeks ago — this error only started popping up after the last YouTube app update pushed out. It feels 100% like Google just stopped properly optimizing the app for older 2GB RAM iPad models, and doesn't care that they broke it entirely for this device generation.

I really don't want to have to fully wipe the iPad and set it up as a brand new device without restoring my old backup, I have years worth of local files and notes on here I don't want to risk messing up. But I'm running completely out of options here. Has anyone else on a 6th gen iPad run into this exact, specific error that locks you out right at the 1 minute mark with that "Something went wrong" message, and actually found a working proper fix that isn't all the basic steps I already burned through? I'm so desperate for a solution right now.