Troubleshooting
The downloader is not working: what to check
Short answer
In order of likelihood: the link is the wrong kind, the post is not public, a platform changed something and a resolver is temporarily broken, or a browser extension is blocking the request. The status page tells you which of these it is faster than guessing, because it shows whether that specific platform is currently resolving. Everything else on this page is the check to run once you know.
What to do
- 1
Read the status page first
It reports each platform separately. If the one you need is down, the answer is to wait rather than to keep retrying, and no other tool is likely to be doing better with the same upstream change.
- 2
Open your link while logged out
If it does not open in a private window, it is not public and nothing will fetch it. This single test rules out the largest category of failures.
- 3
Turn off a content blocker for one attempt
Aggressive blockers sometimes stop the browser reaching the conversion progress endpoint, particularly for YouTube. ClipKoala falls back to a server-side flow when this happens, but the fallback is slower and less informative than just allowing the request.
- 4
Retry once, then move on
Resolvers fail over automatically, so a second attempt does occasionally work where the first did not. A third and fourth will not. If two attempts fail on a link you have confirmed is public, it is worth reporting rather than repeating.
Why downloaders break, honestly
Every platform here is actively changing how it serves media, sometimes weekly, and none of them publish an interface for this. A resolver is an interpretation of how a platform currently works, so when the platform changes, the interpretation breaks. That is the actual, unglamorous reason every tool in this category has bad days.
ClipKoala runs more than one resolver per platform where it can and fails over between them, which turns many outages into a slower response rather than an error. It does not make the underlying fragility go away, and pretending it did would be the kind of claim this project avoids.
Some platforms depend on services we do not run
Worth saying plainly rather than leaving in a footnote: ClipKoala does not talk to every platform directly. Several, Reddit among them, block server-side access hard enough that the post is resolved through a third-party service instead, which is also what merges Reddit's separate video and audio streams into one file. TikTok has more than one resolver behind it and falls over from the first to the second when the first stops working.
The practical consequence is that ClipKoala can be entirely healthy and a platform can still fail, because something upstream of us went down. The status page checks the whole path rather than just our own server, which is why it is worth reading before retrying. When a platform is red there, waiting is genuinely the answer.
What the different failures mean
"Not from a supported platform" is a link problem. "Private" or "restricted" means the post is not public. A timeout or an unexpected server problem usually means a resolver is struggling, which is the case worth checking the status page for. A download that starts and then stalls is generally a network or storage issue on your side.
YouTube is slower on purpose
YouTube serves video and audio separately, so a download has to merge them at the quality you picked. That work happens after you click, which is why there is a progress percentage on the button rather than an instant start. Long videos in 1080p can take up to a minute. That is conversion, not a fault.
Last checked .