The YouTube channel of technical experts Digital Foundry has been taken down for violating community guidelines after it was first hacked and then began broadcasting some crypto scam bullshit earlier today.
Fans first noticed something was up when they visited the channel — or had its videos served to them on YouTube’s front page — and saw that the people normally talking about framerate comparisons and resolution concerns were for some reason broadcasting an Elon Musk presentation about his galactic vanity project, SpaceX.
If the use of Musk hadn’t already tipped you off on where this was going, the page also changed its name to “Space X”, then began broadcasting videos for a cryptocurrency scam. Something Digital Foundry were soon able to confirm:
Rumours we’ve been acquired by Space-X are alas unfounded – our YouTube channel was temporarily hijacked. Everything is in hand and we’re recovering it – sorry for the disruption!
— Digital Foundry (@digitalfoundry) November 9, 2021
Not long after that the entire channel vanished, with Digital Foundry’s content “terminated for violating YouTube’s community guidelines”, likely because of the type of content the scammers had been broadcasting.
Yes, we’re aware of the Digital Foundry YouTube channel vanishing – likely some kind of automated response to the earlier hijacking. We’re investigating and will get this resolved.
— Digital Foundry (@digitalfoundry) November 9, 2021
At time of posting the channel is still down, showing a 404 error to anyone trying to view Digital Foundry’s main page, or any of their videos. While they work behind the scenes with YouTube to try and get things back up and running, a lot of their content — including many videos — are still available on Eurogamer.
If you’ve never enjoyed their stuff before — and we have linked to them countless times over the years — Digital Foundry basically describe themselves as:
Digital Foundry specialises in technical analysis of gaming hardware and software, using state-of-the-art capture systems and bespoke software to show you how well games and hardware run, visualising precisely what they’re capable of.
They’re absolutely leaders in the field of “this is how this game performs on this system” and “this system runs this multiplatform game the best”, so if that kind of technical breakdown is your thing, be sure to visit their page and check out some videos…whenever the page is actually back up.