YouTube’s ‘lofi hip hop radio - beats to relax/study to’ live video briefly disappears, prompting worry from fans

Google has not confirmed why music stream was taken offline

General view of atmosphere YouTube Originals State Of Pride Los Angeles Premiere at The Ricardo Montalban Theatre on May 29, 2019 in Hollywood, California (Presley Ann/Getty Images for YouTube)

One of YouTube's most popular and long-running videos has briefly disappeared.

The live stream – known as "lofi hip hop radio - beats to relax/study to" – has become one of the site's best-known videos.

As its name suggests, the live video offers a rolling playlist of relaxing songs that are intended for people to listen to as they work. That is played over an image of a person known as "study girl" – a looping image of a young woman who is working.

The feed has been watched hundreds of millions of times and is the most famous of a genre that makes up a large part of YouTube, with a variety of different videos offering their own takes on the format.

But the original video briefly went offline over the weekend, and users were unable to access the feed.

A tweet from "Chilled Cow", the largely anonymous creator of the video, showed a message apparently set by YouTube's administrators that claimed the feed might have broken the site's terms of service and that the channel had been "terminated". It also said that the user would be banned from setting up any other YouTube accounts.

That led to worry among the feed's many fans. A flurry of tweets expressed upset that the video had been taken offline and hope that it would come back up again.

Others joked that perhaps the person in the video, known as "Study Girl", had finally finished her homework.

But soon after that, the ban appeared to be reversed, and the live video is back online with the same name.

YouTube and its owner, Google, have not given any public confirmation of why the account was taken down or which part of the terms of service it is thought to have broken. A spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Many of the music videos take other artists' songs and artwork, and so can be punished for copyright infringements, and the videos have also been accused of using YouTube's algorithm so that they regularly appear as recommended videos.