Facebook videos and Reels not playing on desktop for some users, mobile still works

Facebook users seem to be running into an issue with video playback on their computers, with multiple threads popping up on Reddit as people realized the problem wasn’t just affecting them. Videos and Reels appear to load but won’t actually play when the play button is clicked, leaving users stuck with a frozen player on Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Safari, and other browsers.

Interestingly, YouTube and other video platforms work just fine on the same computers. The issue affects both Windows 11 and macOS systems, and users have tried everything from clearing browser caches to switching networks without success. But when the same people open Facebook on their phones or tablets, videos play normally.

One Reddit user in Egypt noted something interesting after troubleshooting. When they logged into a different Facebook account on the same browser and computer, videos worked perfectly. Switch back to their main account and everything freezes again.

Other users confirmed the same behavior, with some noting their older Facebook accounts from 2015 won’t play videos on desktop, while newer accounts have zero issues.

Reports are coming in from all over — United States, Canada, UK, Greece, Philippines, Egypt, Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, Hungary, and more. One particularly annoying detail users mentioned is that sponsored videos and ads still play without problems, but regular feed videos and Reels refuse to start.

Users have been flooding multiple discussion threads on r/facebook trying to figure out what’s going on. Several have reported the issue directly to Facebook through the “Help & Support” menu, though no official acknowledgment or fix has appeared yet.

I wasn’t able to replicate the problem in my testing on Dia and Chrome on a Mac. That said, since the problem appears tied to specific accounts rather than devices or browsers, I suspect that this is a server-side glitch on Facebook’s end. The account-specific nature of the bug is especially frustrating because standard troubleshooting steps don’t help at all.

For now, affected users are stuck watching Reels on their phones or switching to backup accounts if they need desktop access. We’ll keep an eye out for any further developments and will update the article accordingly.

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