YouTube RSS feed endpoint returns 404 errors

Questions
1

Hi everyone,

I’ve been experiencing intermittent 404 errors when fetching YouTube channel RSS feeds over the past week. The issue seems to follow a specific pattern.

Problem: YouTube RSS feed endpoint returns 404 errors for channels that are clearly active and have public videos.

Endpoint:

https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id={CHANNEL_ID}

Error Response:

404 - The requested URL /feeds/videos.xml?channel_id={CHANNEL_ID} was not found on this server.

Pattern Observed:

  • Errors occur primarily between 09:00 - 12:00 UTC

  • Same channels work fine outside this time window

  • No changes made to implementation

  • Started approximately one week ago

What I’ve Verified:

  • Channels are active and public

  • Same URLs work in browser during error periods

  • No authentication issues (RSS feeds are public)

  • Different channels randomly affected each time

Questions:

  1. Is there a known rate limit for YouTube RSS feeds?

  2. Are there any changes or deprecation plans for this endpoint?

Any insights would be appreciated. Thank you!

1 Like
2

I have the exact same problem.

3

Hi @yurtgoktug and @gl1416, instead of using the normal RSS Read node, try using an HTTP request node with custom headers.
Method: GET
URL: Your RSS URL
Authentication: None
Add headers:
Name: User-Agent
Value: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/120.0.0.0 Safari/537.36

After the HTTP request node, add an XML node to convert the result into a JSON that you can use.

Hopefully this helps. Please let me know if it does! And if it does, please make sure to mark my comment as the solution :slight_smile: Good luck!

1 Like
4

Hi @ailinwerner

This is actually exactly what I’m doing right now =)

Screenshot 2025-12-27 at 16.12.33
Screenshot 2025-12-27 at 16.12.33886×1212 51.3 KB

5

Is it because of the missing headers parameters?

This was working perfectly for about a year. For the last couple of weeks the system responds with 404 for a specific time period during the day and then it starts working again.

6

@yurtgoktug, I was looking into it and I came upon something that caught my eye. From 9 to 12 is apparently the “global peak hour”, so youtube basically prioritizes real user to automations (not entirely sure if this is the case, but would explain why when you try yourself it works… but when you try with the automation it doesn’t) :frowning: Did you try with the headers to see if it makes a difference?

1 Like
7

Oh I see. I will try tonight and update you with the results tomorrow morning.

1 Like
8

Thanks! Good luck!

10

With the user agent parameters it responded with 404 again today =(

11

Hi @yurtgoktug , how strange…. can you change when it runs to be outside of the 9 to 12 UTC? just to check if it works or not on other hours (to make sure it’s not the peak hour issue). I’m not too sure what it could be tbh :frowning:

12

Eventually I need to migrate to YouTube DATA API but its limits are very low =(

13

For the first time in a very long time, RSS didn’t sent me a 404 error today. Wonder if they fixed it.

1 Like
14

Hey @yurtgoktug! Well, that’s good news!! Happy it’s working, what ever the reason! :smiley:

15

Tomorrow is another challenge =)

1 Like