xQc's YouTube channel terminated, leaving streamer shocked

YouTuber xQc has had his channel suddenly terminated and shut down, after he seemingly violated the site’s community guidelines surrounding copyright.

Felix ‘xQc’ Lengyel boasts over an incredible 2,300,000 subscribers on YouTube, making him one of the most popular creators in the gaming space. However, he’s recently come under fire for posting what many have deemed to be ‘stolen’ content. You may have noticed that xQc has taken to posting ‘reaction’ based content. This is when a creator reacts to a video or piece of viral content created by someone else. It’s a practice that’s come under fire in recent months as many believe that reaction-based content doesn’t add enough to the original source to warrant its reuse.

Content creation and livestreaming can be so unpredictable.

It’s this debate that began the doxxing debacle between SSSniperwolf and Jacksfilms earlier this year. Lately, xQc has refrained from posting reaction content on his main channel in the hopes of avoiding a copyright strike. His hopes were in vain though. Yesterday, on 26 November, xQc’s channel was terminated and taken down. If you attempted to visit the site, it read, “This page isn’t available. Sorry about that. Try searching for something else.”

As reported by Dexerto, xQc responded to this news during a livestream, expressing his confusion. He explained that he believed it was down to pending counterclaims on copyright strikes which might’ve resulted in “auto-termination”. He said, “I think it’s because, like basically I think some [...] strikes were going to kick in, then I had like a counterclaim, and then it just, it didn’t kick in in time or something like that, and it’s auto-termination, but it comes back up.”

He continued, “I’m financially not mad about it and never will, cause it was always for people. YouTube is for people, I don’t care what the amount of money it makes… It sucks that we lose it for now because people don’t get their content, right? But revenue-wise, I haven’t looked twice at it.”

It looks as if the ban may be in the opening stages of being lifted. At the time of writing, if you search xQc via YouTube, the account is still not visible. However, if you search xQc via Google, you are now able to click on the channel with all content available to view. I’m imagining we’ll see a full restoration as the day progresses.