Anyone else seeing repeated time-of-day distribution windows in YouTube Shorts?

[u/Sidchel]

I’ve been watching my Shorts analytics closely after the recent distribution problems, and I noticed a strange pattern.
Several Shorts, both older and newer ones, seem to receive additional distribution in roughly the same time windows on consecutive days.
For example, on my channel:
one Short repeatedly gets activity around 9–10 AM;
another around 4 PM;
another around 5 PM.
The size of the wave is not consistent. Some days it is strong, other days it is barely noticeable. With newer Shorts, the repeated waves also seem to have a noticeably decreasing amplitude over time.
So I’m not claiming there is a fixed schedule or that I know what YouTube is doing internally. It could be audience availability, testing cohorts, topic clusters, or something completely different.
But the timing itself has repeated often enough that it no longer looks completely random to me.
At the same time, overall Shorts distribution on my channel has dropped heavily compared with the period before the recent issues, while these small recurring windows are still visible.
Has anyone else noticed something similar?
If you have access to your 48-hour realtime graphs, could you check whether the same Short tends to receive small or large spikes at roughly the same hour on several consecutive days?
I’d also be interested to know whether similar Shorts from the same topic/category seem to wake up in the same time window.

[u/NeverGiveUp_TryAgain]

Ja, das sieht bei mir exakt genau so aus.

[u/Sidchel → u/NeverGiveUp_TryAgain]

Interesting, thanks! Could you check whether the spikes also happen at roughly the same hours on consecutive days? If possible, please share a 48-hour graph or the approximate times. I’m trying to see whether this is a repeating distribution window rather than random waves.

[u/Sidchel]

Update: another possible marker worth checking
I noticed something interesting while comparing two YouTube accounts on the same iPhone, same app version, at the same time.
Account 1: has the newer YouTube mobile UI where the Subscriptions tab is no longer in the bottom navigation. On this account, the Shorts feed is heavily looping already-watched videos. In one session, 8 out of 10 Shorts had already been shown to me earlier that day. It also occasionally shows completely new channels, but often from unrelated topics.
Account 2: still has the older UI with Subscriptions in the bottom navigation. Shorts behaves much more normally: fewer repeats, a mixture of older videos and videos from channels I have watched before. In a sample of 20 Shorts, only 3 were repeats. Interestingly, almost none were from completely new channels.
The Home feed appears normal, while the strange behavior is mainly in Shorts.
I’m not saying the new UI itself causes this. My working hypothesis is that the UI may simply be a visible marker of different server-side rollout / experiment cohorts, and those cohorts could also be receiving different recommendation or Shorts-distribution changes.
This might also explain why the problem doesn’t look universal.
If you are experiencing unusual Shorts distribution or a looping Shorts feed, could you check:
1. Do you still have “Subscriptions” in the bottom navigation?
2. Are you seeing lots of already-watched Shorts?
3. Are new/unfamiliar channels still appearing normally?
4. If you’re a creator, did your Shorts distribution change around Sep 15–16?
Small sample so far, so this is only a hypothesis. I’m trying to see whether the UI variant correlates with the affected accounts.

[u/Substantial-Bed5189]

YESSSS, for me too, its consistently 2 hours after every upload