Help

Download failed or timed out

These messages are about our processing service, not your link. They are temporary by nature, and a couple of specific retries clear almost all of them.

All help topics

The two different messages

“The download service is temporarily unavailable.”The processing service did not respond. That happens during a restart, a brief outage, or when the platform we are fetching from is refusing requests at that moment.

“Preparing this video took too long.”The request ran past its time limit. Long videos and high resolutions take the longest, because the video and audio are fetched and merged before anything is handed to you.

What actually helps

Wait a moment and retry
Genuinely the most effective step — these are transient by definition.
Choose a lower quality
If a long video keeps timing out, dropping from 1080p to 720p meaningfully reduces how much has to be fetched and merged, so it finishes well inside the limit.
Check the service status
The status page reports whether each platform is currently working, from real recent samples. If a platform shows trouble there, the problem is not your link.
Try again a little later
Platforms sometimes rate-limit automated requests for a while. Waiting is the only real fix for that.

What will not help

If it keeps happening

A failure that repeats for the same link over a long period usually means that particular video is problematic rather than the service. Tell us the link and the message and we will investigate. You can read how a link is processed for what happens between paste and download.